Buy John Cameron’s Newest Thriller ReKill Now
Chapter 14
Heather Reyes sat in the locked bathroom in the back of her aunt’s crap doublewide, wondering when Lee and Jack would come get her. Aunt’s asshole boyfriend had stepped on her iPhone. He said it was an accident but she knew different. She didn’t like the way he looked at her when her ‘Auntie’ wasn’t around. And her father was dead. There was no way he had killed himself, no freaking way. She might only be nearly twelve, but she knew her father loved her more than anything in the world and knew he wouldn’t do that to her, no matter how bad the news from the doctor had been.
Her dad always told her everything important. He was sort of a hypochondriac. He had IBS and they’d done a colonoscopy and he’d been worried about a couple of the polyps they removed. Then his doctor called and he’d laughed and tried to act like he wasn’t worried. She knew her dad wasn’t a great actor. Okay he was a terrible actor. No, that wasn’t right. He had been a terrible actor.
She had always been able to figure out what he bought for her birthday or Christmas and knew exactly where it was hidden. He was an open book to her. Now, she could act. She could always keep things from him when she wanted to-not that she ever really wanted to. She just sort of kept in practice for when she started dating.
She cried again. She wouldn’t need to know how to hide things from him. She wouldn’t watch him be proud of her, see the look of concern when she went on her first date, get to listen to him tell that her dress was too short or her top showed too much cleavage, if she ever got cleavage. She wouldn’t get to see him try to intimidate her boyfriends. She wouldn’t get to see him cry at her high school graduation, or college or medical school. She wouldn’t get to see him smile when she became a surgeon. She wouldn’t have all those wonderful years.
She told herself, “Get it together, Heather!” She would have plenty of time to cry later.
Right now, Heather was acting helpless. The bathroom door lock was on the inside, but her aunt’s asshole boyfriend had pushed something up against the door from the outside. Heather couldn’t budge the door. She had been pounding on the door and screaming. Then she figured they were going to keep her, so she stopped pounding and screaming. There was enough of a gap under the door so that if she lay down on the filthy, peeling, linoleum floor she could see the hall. There was a two-by-four jammed under the doorknob.
She first thought to get out of the window, but after she measured she knew she wouldn’t fit through, even though she was pretty slim through the hips, one of the reasons she was so fast.
Think, Heather Maria Reyes! Think!
She sat down on the toilet seat, after she covered it with paper towels. How could people live like this? Then she did what her dad taught her when he showed her how to find wildlife. She let her eyes slide over everything in the place. She looked at the shower, looked at the sink, looked in the medicine cabinet, looked at the toilet, looked under the sink. Then she assembled everything that looked like it might help.
There was an unopened enema bag and hose. She pulled the hose out. She dropped on her side again and looked out under the gap in the door. The two by four was jammed under the lock to her right. If she could wrap something around it, or catch it with something, then she could pull the two-by-four to the side and get out and then run out the back door. She knew she could hide forever from fat asshole and Auntie in the woods. And she could certainly outrun them. She was second fastest on her soccer team and had taken a silver medal at the last meet in the eight hundred.
She had a problem. She didn’t have anything she could put on the end of the hose so that it would catch on the two by four to pull it to the side. She looked at everything again. She looked at the toilet, in the medicine cabinet, under the sink. The toilet! That was it. She took the cover off and unhooked the chain that connected the flapper and the lever.
The hook on the end was pretty flimsy, but it was all she had. She tied the hose and chain together and practiced flicking it out flat. She needed to practice wrapping it around something. The curtain rod! When she pulled it down she looked at the hooks on the curtain rod and shook her head. Hiding in plain sight. Heather Maria Reyes took the flimsy flapper chain hook off and secured three of the curtain hooks into the chain near the end and practiced. By her thirty-eighth try she was hooking it around the curtain rod she had leaned up against the wall nine times out of ten.
She sat on the toilet and thought for a while. She tried to think about getting out, but she kept coming back to her dad. She knew he didn’t have cancer. He just flat out couldn’t act. She knew he was worried about something else. He hadn’t told her what it was, but he said that he had done a lot of research and he was sure the fix was in. He even hired a former sheriff’s deputy to keep watch on her. The only reason he hadn’t stopped her aunt and fat asshole was he was in a hit and run on his motorcycle, broken leg, and his replacement hadn’t shown yet.
Dad said there were some hard case types around town that didn’t fit. Before his family sold the mill, he had hired ex-cons to work there. He said these guys were ex-cons, but different. Perfect teeth and no tattoos, but he could still tell. He said he called Jack and was going to see him. And he had given her two CDs to hide. Heather Maria Reyes didn’t know how she knew, but she knew someone killed her dad and tried to make it look like suicide.