Chapter 5 - The Midnight Lockout
The metallic ping of the overhead paging system echoed down the empty corridor like a gunshot.
Beth grabbed my coat collar instantly.
“Emily, move right now,” she whispered, her eyes darting toward the bay window.
Eleanor released my hand, pushing me away toward the wall with surprising force.
“Get out of here through the courtyard,” Eleanor hissed, her voice sharp and steady despite her frail frame.
“Claudia has a master notification alert on her private phone whenever someone queries my medical chart at the desk.
If she’s here, she didn't come alone.”
The door handle jiggled slightly from the outside hallway.
Marcus's muffled, panicked voice drifted through the wood: “Ma’am, you cannot enter this wing after midnight without administrative clearance!”
A sharp, familiar voice cut through the heavy oak: “Get out of my way, young man, before I have your nursing credentials revoked by eight o'clock tomorrow morning.”
Claudia.
She hadn't waited for morning.
She had driven straight from Upper Arlington the moment Derek's processing at the central precinct had given her the alarm.
“The window,” Beth whispered, her hands working rapidly on the brass latch of the heavy bay glass.
The casement swung outward into the cold autumn night, letting in a rush of damp pine air and the smell of fallen leaves.
I looked back at the woman in the bed.
Eleanor had already pulled the cream quilt up to her chin.
She closed her eyes, instantly transforming herself back into the picture of a passive, heavily sedated geriatric patient staring blankly into the shadows.
“Front Street,” Eleanor whispered without moving her lips.
“Monday morning is too late, Emily.
Go tonight.”
Beth scrambled out the low window first, dropping two feet onto the damp mulch of the interior courtyard.
I swung my legs over the sill, my boots landing quietly in the wet earth just as the heavy brass latch of Room 214 clicked open inside.
I didn't dare look back through the glass.
Beth grabbed my hand, pulling me into the dense shadow of a sprawling Japanese maple that bordered the brick walkway.
Through the parted curtains of the room we had just fled, the harsh overhead fluorescent light snapped on.
Claudia Walsh stood in the doorway.
She was dressed in a tailored wool overcoat, her silver-blonde hair immaculately pinned, her face cold and sculpted like marble.
Beside her stood a tall, burly man in an unbuttoned trench coat whom I recognized immediately.
It was Frank Vance, the head of private security for Vale Commercial Properties—the man Derek called whenever tenants protested illegal eviction notices.
Claudia stood over Eleanor’s bed, her lips moving rapidly in furious speech.
Eleanor did not react; she lay perfectly still, playing the role of the ruined, dying mother they had manufactured for her.
Then Claudia turned sharply on her heel and scanned the room.
Her eyes locked onto the open window casement.
She pointed toward the glass, her face contorting with sudden, violent realization.
“Move!” Beth breathed into my ear.
We bolted through the dark courtyard, our boots churning wet mulch and dead leaves.
A low brick wall separated the facility garden from the edge of the dense pine woods that sloped downward toward the gravel access road.
Behind us, an exterior emergency door banged open against its metal frame.
“Hey!
Stop right there!” Frank Vance’s booming voice cut through the trees.
The sharp beam of a heavy industrial flashlight sliced through the darkness, sweeping across the pine trunks twenty feet to our left.
Beth reached the low stone wall first, throwing her body over the masonry into the wet underbrush on the other side.
I caught my coat on a jagged capstone, the fabric tearing with a loud rip as I pulled myself across.
The flashlight beam swung violently toward us, illuminating the torn hem of my beige sweater.
“Vance, down the embankment!” Claudia’s voice screamed from the patio.
“Do not let them get to the car!”
We tumbled down the muddy slope, slipping on wet pine needles and sliding on our heels until the dark gravel of the secondary maintenance road met our feet.
Beth's Subaru was parked three hundred yards away, tucked under the weeping willows near the darkened main lot.
“Run, Emily!” Beth gasped, her lungs wheezing in the cold dampness.
We sprinted down the edge of the gravel, keeping low beneath the line of cedar trees.
Behind us, the crunch of heavy boots running over loose stone sounded entirely too close.
Vance was younger than us, faster, and driven by the ruthless preservation of Claudia’s empire.
We reached the blue Subaru just as the headlights of a large black SUV flared to life at the far end of the circle drive, turning toward us with an engine roar that shattered the night.
Beth ripped the driver’s door open and hit the central unlock.
I threw myself into the passenger seat, slamming the heavy door shut and slapping down the manual lock button.
Vance reached the rear bumper just as Beth slammed the car into reverse.
His heavy fist pounded against the rear glass with a deafening thud that shook the cabin.
“Open the damn door, Emily!” Vance roared, his face illuminated by our red brake lights, contorted in aggressive fury.
Beth slammed her foot on the accelerator.
The Subaru lurched backward, spinning its front tires on the wet gravel and spewing stones against Vance's shins.
He stumbled back, swearing violently, as Beth whipped the wheel around, threw the transmission into drive, and launched the car toward the unlit access gate.
The black SUV surged into the driveway behind us, its high-beam halogen lights blinding our rearview mirrors with searing white light.
“She’s trying to ram us!” Beth cried, her knuckles white as she fought the steering wheel against the wet asphalt of Delaware County Road 14.
“She won't ram us on a two-lane public road,” I said, my teeth chattering as the adrenaline flooded my veins.
“Call 911 right now, Beth!
Put it on speaker!”
Beth kept her left hand on the wheel while I snatched her phone from the mount and dialed the three digits.
“Delaware County Emergency, what is the address of your emergency?” a dispatcher’s calm voice filled the car.
“We are traveling south on County Road 14 toward Route 23!” I shouted into the microphone.
“We are being pursued by a black Cadillac Escalade, license plate Ohio commercial!
They are attempting to force our vehicle off the road!”
As if the driver of the Escalade possessed a police scanner, the high beams behind us suddenly backed off three car lengths.
Two miles ahead, the brilliant yellow sodium lights of the commercial interchange at Route 23 appeared through the rain.
A Delaware County sheriff's cruiser was parked visibly in the median strip near the highway entrance, running speed radar.
The moment our Subaru blew past the cruiser at fifty-five miles an hour with our hazard lights flashing, the black Escalade behind us executed a sharp, illegal U-turn across the grass median and vanished into the northern dark.
Beth pulled the car onto the shoulder three hundred yards down the highway, her entire body shaking so violently that her teeth clicked together.
The cruiser behind us flipped on its amber caution lights and pulled up slowly to our rear bumper.
I sat back against the headrest, my heart pounding like a trapped bird inside my ribs.
My hand drifted down into my tote bag, finding the cold metal casing of Sadie’s camera.
I thought of my husband, Derek, sitting in his holding cell in Columbus, waiting for Claudia to bail him out with money stolen from his own mother.
I thought of Claudia standing over that hospital bed, believing she still controlled the board.
And then I remembered the three words Eleanor had whispered into the shadows of Room 214:
Go tonight.
I turned to Beth as the deputy tapped his flashlight against the rain-soaked driver’s window.
May you like
“Beth,” I said, my voice completely devoid of fear for the first time in ten years.
“We aren't going back to Worthington to sleep.
