Four Found Dead, page 6
“Where did he go?” Quincy asks, but his eyes keep drifting to Summer whose shaking is growing worse.
Hudson bounces on the balls of his feet. “No idea.”
“We knew it was weird, but we didn’t know he was dangerous or whatever. We didn’t have any clue about…” Hannah trails off with a shaky sigh.
Hudson shakes his head, and Naomi closes her eyes. Summer sniffles, curling inward into her shroud of red hair. The reality of Lexi’s death rolls through our bodies again, and we all crack in different places under the weight. But I have felt this weight before. Does that mean there’s something too broken in me? Something that doesn’t feel this the way I should? Or does it just mean I’m braced for what comes next?
Because I know this won’t be the last time it hits us. Death is like the tide; it rolls in and out in an endless cycle. Waiting in this hallway won’t change it. If anything, it might give us another death to worry about. And I’m not about to take that chance. We need to move.
I look around, but everyone seems trapped in a haze of shock and horror. I clear my throat and think of Naomi and Cara again.
This isn’t how I wanted to find my voice. I was supposed to save trauma victims, not shepherd my coworkers away from a killer. But right now, I seem to be the only person who isn’t lost in a shock-induced haze.
“Maybe we should vote on what to do,” I say.
Hannah nods. “I think we should go to the mall.”
Quincy steeples his fingers under his chin. “It seems like the only choice.”
Hudson shrugs. “We get a hold of Clayton’s gun; a bullet might take care of the glass.”
“Or it might end up in one of us!” The sharpness of my tone surprises me, but the words are already out, and even with everyone looking, I still can’t hold the next words in, though my voice peters to a whisper. “Nothing good is coming from that, Hudson.”
He looks at me, and I can see a million questions in his gaze. I feel like a locked door that’s been cracked open. If I don’t stop this now, he’ll curl his fingers into that opening and pry my secrets out. I turn to Naomi to shut him down.
“So what’s your vote?” I ask.
“I want to be as far away from Clayton as I can,” she says. “I vote for the mall.”
We go around the room again, but in the end, everyone votes to go to the mall, even Hudson. We make our way back to the door that opens to the lobby. Hannah is in the lead, but she pauses at the push bar on the door, her brow furrowed.
“What is it?” Quincy asks.
“I hear something,” she says.
I’m opening my mouth to ask when I hear it too, a distant murmur. A voice.
My heart shoots into my throat, and Summer meets my eyes. I see my fear mirrored in her face and know instantly that I’m not jumping to conclusions. That isn’t the voice of someone here to rescue us. It’s Clayton.
Hudson moves forward and presses the door open the tiniest sliver. Clayton’s voice is instantly clearer.
“I’m not mad. I get it. It’s been a tough night for all of us. We’re all scared. But we’re all stuck here without those keys. So stop hiding.”
He’s by the concessions, maybe by the soda machine from the sound of it. The angle of the egress door will make it impossible for Clayton to see, but it makes me nervous all the same.
“Just bring me the keys, and we can go outside,” Clayton says. His voice is rising. It’s obvious he’s getting antsy. It’s just as obvious he’s been at this a while. We must not have been able to hear him while we were in the emergency hallway.
“Hello?” he shouts. And then, more softly: “Damn it.”
For long, long seconds, he does not speak again. We stand in the cramped space of the dim emergency corridor staring at one another. I can feel my heartbeat under my skin. Summer’s breath comes faster and faster until I’m worried she might start screaming—might launch into a full-blown panic attack. Hannah takes her hand, and Summer steadies.
I’m steady too. Steady because I’m not moving at all. My eyes stay locked on the sliver of a gap between the door and the frame. Hudson is positioned between me and that gap. My eyes graze over his angular jaw and prominent Adam’s apple. I notice a utilitarian silver chain peeking out from his T-shirt and a blue stain near his collar.
“None of us are getting out of here until you bring those keys back!” Clayton shouts. And then he mutters something under his breath. A minute later we hear a door creak open. His voice comes again, much more muffled than before.
“He’s in one of the theaters,” Quincy whispers.
Hannah nods. “He must be checking them. He’s looking for us.”
“He’ll eventually check this hallway, then, right?” Summer asks. Her voice is a squeak, and her theory is difficult to argue.
My pulse races even faster. Hudson has pushed the door open another inch, and I can see the connector door all the way across the lobby, the one that will lead us to the mall. Hudson pushes the door a little wider, sticking his head out. He listens hard and then, without warning, pushes the door wide.
“He’s in Theater Three. This is our chance.”
My stomach folds in on itself. I know exactly why I don’t like the idea of being out there again, exposed in that cavernous lobby. Clayton won’t stay in that theater. He could come out at any second. He could see us.
But Hudson doesn’t see it as a risk. He sees it as an opportunity. He pushes the door wide and waves quickly. “Go! Go right now!”
I open my mouth to argue, but everyone flies into motion. Quincy and Hannah and Naomi and even Summer are rushing into the lobby. Hudson whispers my name, but I hear other things as well.
Bells jangling over a door.
Lighters spilling on the floor.
A final gurgling breath.
And then Hudson takes my hand, and I do the only thing I can. I run.
10:04 AM / April 13, 2023
CITY REVOKES CONSTRUCTION PERMITS AT SITE OF TRAGEDY
Darrin Roberts—Northeast Ohio News
City Council revoked all active construction for the site of former shopping mall Riverview Fashionplace following the April 8 tragic deaths of four Riverview Theater employees. City Council President Troy Feibel cites egregious safety issues among other factors in a lengthy council statement on this topic. “Four of our neighbors are dead, and that building played a significant role in their deaths,” Feibel said in an emotional statement before the council and many community members. “Four people are gone, and I’ll wonder for the rest of my life how many of them might have lived if these so-called oversights had been resolved.” Construction, which included a partial demolition of the former mall, has been halted since the time of the tragedy. Neither Coplex Construction nor PDG Development, who held the majority of the permits, provided comment on this matter.
Chapter 10
We fly across the lobby, past the ticket booths and geometric carpet and the condiment stand Quincy and I straightened. We bunch into a tight pack at the door and fumble with the handle. I am nudged by shoulders and jabbed by elbows, but I stay right in the middle of it.
“It’s locked,” Quincy whispers.
“Get the key,” Naomi says; she’s too short to reach.
Hannah grabs it for them, and I hear her fiddling with the doorknob. The key scrapes at the metal lock, and it is so loud. I know he’ll hear us. He must hear us. A whine rises behind my ears as Hannah lets Hudson take a turn at the key. It isn’t working. They can’t get it open, which means we’re trapped here. We’ll never make it back to the hallway before he sees us.
My throat squeezes tighter with every breath. I know what’s coming for us—I know what we will look like on the ground, how we will sound when we are bleeding out on this ugly carpet.
And then—finally—there’s the click-click of the lock disengaging. The door swings wide, and we snake through into the connector hallway, a desperate centipede rushing for the safety of the darkness. I wedge my foot into the doorframe before it can fully close.
“Should we leave this propped open?”
“It’s a good question,” Quincy says. “There isn’t a doorknob on the mall side. Maybe we should.”
He’s still hanging close to me in the darkness, but the others are already down the hall—out of sight and maybe inside the main atrium of the mall.
“Stop playing games!”
Clayton’s voice sends goose bumps up my arms. He is losing patience now. The anger is clear in every word. My heart trips over itself, like it, too, is trying to escape him.
“How the hell do you think this will work? You think you’re walking out of here without me knowing?”
I close my eyes, trying to place him, trying to calculate angles and add distances in my head like I’ll be able to suddenly figure out how sound travels. As if I have any chance of pinpointing his location. Of course, I have no damn idea where he is.
What I know is this: Clayton is out there. And he’s looking for us.
A rush of shadow and footsteps moves back up the hallway from the mall. I inhale sharply, but it’s just Hudson, his angular face cast in strange shadows by the flashlight he’s holding.
He reaches and pulls my fingers from the gap before I can think. The door slowly, quietly clicks shut, leaving us in the connector hallway. The theater—the one piece of this building that’s familiar and habitable—is now sealed behind a steel door, one with no knob on this side.
Panic bubbles up through my middle. I drag my fingers over the door, feeling for a knob I know isn’t there. This is a one-way door, but Hudson wouldn’t close it if there weren’t a way back in, would he? There must be a gap. Something. I keep feeling and patting, and over and over I come up dry.
There’s nothing. We’re trapped here. Hudson has pulled us out of one prison and locked us right into another.
“What did you do?” Quincy asks.
“Only chance we have of him not finding us is if he doesn’t know we’re in here.” Hudson shifts his flashlight to point down the hallway, toward the mall. “Come on.”
He urges us both down the hallway, and I stumble after on legs that feel wooden and strange. The darkness of the hallway gives way when we meet the mouth of the now-defunct Riverview Fashionplace, a three-story shopping mall with a river running through the full length of the main atrium. Once, there were walls coated in faux rock, and sheets of Spanish moss dangled from the bridges that spanned the river. Back then, this place featured everything a cheesy mall designer could muster up, from fountains to waterfalls to misters.
When I was little, Mom used to bring Cara and me. We would run over the bridges that connected the east and west halves of the mall. We would sit, enraptured by performers on the kitschy clamshell stage, and sometimes we’d try to find more of the carved frogs and fireflies hidden throughout the waterscape. When we were little, I always counted the most. But after the gas station, after that awful day, I always let Cara win.
Now, even in the dim light, the mall is barely recognizable. A bone-white channel stretches out behind Naomi and Hannah, the remnants of the river that once bisected the entire mall. I can see the first bridge maybe ten yards behind them, some of the boards busted loose, the handrail completely missing on the left side. Even when I started at the theater, a lot of the mall stores were permanently closed. Wallboards stretched across long expanses of the mall, turning a former Bath & Body Works or American Eagle into a mural advertising YOUR NEXT FAVORITE SHOP—COMING SOON.
Now those murals are interspersed with giant yellow-brown plywood sheets and enormous plastic drapes. Some of the stores are empty, yawning dark cavities behind pull-down security gates or taped-over glass doors.
“Hudson closed the door,” Quincy says.
Hannah’s shoulders pull back. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“We heard Clayton. He’s looking for us, so I closed the door,” Hudson says.
“There’s no handle on those doors on this side,” Hannah says.
“We don’t need a handle. We’re getting out,” Hudson says, and he’s already looking to the left, where plywood entirely covers the hallway that once led to the emergency doors. Plastic cover drapes the area to the right, but I’m not feeling much better about that.
“You aren’t going to say anything?” Hannah asks. She’s looking at Naomi, but Naomi shakes her hair with a hard laugh.
“Hell no. It doesn’t matter if it’s open or locked to me. I’m never going back in there.”
“Please hurry,” Summer says.
The softness of her voice confuses me. We all stop and look at her, and her eyes are wide and terrified, her red hair hanging in tangled lines around her shoulders and waist, her long skirt and cardigan trembling. Her eyes are locked on the dark hallway we exited, on the locked door we left behind. “Please. Before he comes for us.”
There’s a thinness to her voice, a desperation that reminds me this is not just a power outage and an inconvenient misplacement of the keys to unlock the main doors. Clayton killed Lexi, and Summer was there when it happened. She is pale and trembling—the way she’s been since I found her in that locker room.
Summer saw exactly what Clayton did, and she is terrified. Maybe we should all be terrified. And maybe we should all do exactly what Summer said. We need to hurry.
“She’s right,” I say. Everyone’s eyes turn to me, and I squeeze my hands into fists. They look like I need to say something else, but I need to think. I can’t just blurt out the right thing without thinking.
Is that even something a person can learn? How can I be a doctor if I can’t make quick decisions?
Hudson goes over to the plywood section first, jogging the length of the diagonal slab, checking all the places where the sheets overlap. Soon enough, he comes back shaking his head. “No dice. Let’s try through all that plastic shit.”
Irritation flares in my middle. Hudson lives like every single second of his life is a call to action. Like the only wrong choice he could make is sitting still.
He disappears through the curtains of plastic. A few seconds later, he swears, and I know the other exit is blocked too.
“What the hell are we going to do?” Naomi asks.
“There are other doors, right?” Quincy nods toward the dry riverbed and the mall atrium beyond it. “There’ll be doors in the middle, won’t there?”
As familiar as I am with this building, I’m having a hard time reconciling the scene before me with my memories of the tacky, water-themed mall scape. I remember walls molded to look like streamside vistas and lights that shimmered blue, green, and purple. It was like slipping into a fairy tale when I was little. Now there are heaps of two-by-fours and piles of busted drywall and plastic sheets hanging as far as the eye can see. The place was in slow decay for years, but now it’s a foreign land. The backdrop of a sad documentary.
I scan the area and spot a large door between two boarded-over shops labeled STAIRWELL and another alcove labeled RESTROOMS. I can also see the signpost that once held a map of the mall. There are bits and pieces of the place I remember, but it’s like looking at the carcass of a once beautiful bird, its bones and innards splayed across oil-stained pavement.
Hudson returns, and we move together toward the atrium, following the white channel of the riverbed. Quincy, Naomi, and I stay to the right, but Hannah, Summer, and Hudson veer left. Hudson kicks at one of the plastic vines still clinging to the side of the riverbed.
I hate that our party has been split. It’s a five-foot-wide river, maybe two feet deep at the worst. We’re a few steps away from them, and logically I know that’s not a big deal. This isn’t dangerous. But I can’t help the uneasy feeling rolling through me.
“The next set of doors will be up here across from the stage,” I say.
“I don’t remember the mall very well,” Quincy says.
“Not much to remember,” Hudson says, kicking a scrap of wood out of his path. “Shops on this floor and the one above. Third floor is all private offices. Creepy, identical offices.”
“They had offices up there?” Hannah asks.
Hudson nods. “That’s how the failing started. Sandusky was never going to be big enough to handle a mall this size, so when they couldn’t find vendors for the third floor, they rented it out as office space to attorneys and psychiatrists and whoever else.”
“Did that work?” Naomi asks.
“Well, we are standing in the middle of a dead shopping ma—”
“Shh.”
It’s Quincy who cuts Hudson off. He has his finger up, like maybe he was going to physically hush us, but he isn’t looking at any of us. He’s looking back down the mall the way we came, his eyes trained on the connector hallway to the theater.
“Did you hear that?” he asks, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“Hear what?” Hudson says.
“I thought I heard something creak,” Quincy says.
And then there’s a sound that turns my blood cold. It is a simple click-thunk. As familiar as my own voice, but this time it’s enough to steal my breath and leave my knees wobbly.
It is the sound of a heavy door closing. And I know in an instant what door just closed and why. It’s the door to the theater. Clayton followed us in, and let the door swing shut behind him.
We are trapped with a killer. Again.
Chapter 11
I lock eyes with Hudson across the river channel for the span of a breath. Maybe Clayton didn’t come inside the mall. Maybe he opened the door and peeked in, but decided to let it close when he didn’t hear anything. It’s possible he’s still in the theater. And then I hear footsteps.
Hudson breaks our gaze, and both groups spring into action, rabbits running for the darkness of our burrows. Quincy and Naomi choose a tall, plastic-draped fountain for cover. I crouch with them but immediately scan for a better option. Tucked behind the north side of the fountain, we can’t see anything to the south, which is exactly where we heard Clayton.
