Free The Orphan by Christopher Ransom

appear somewhere in the backyard and they might see him fleeing on foot. He thought of wrapping one of the towels around his fist to punch his way through another of the basement windows, escaping through a window well or some such, but he feared the sound of shattering glass would only draw their attention.
    Above him, the sound of a door slamming echoed down. Another, and then another. Adam knew they were going room to room now, searching for him.
    The backyard, then. Same way he came in. He looked across the billiard table, to the rack of cue sticks on the wall. He thought of taking one to use as a spear or a club. But he discarded this option out of fear the long stick would only slow him down.
    He remembered the butterfly knife and slung off his backpack, intending to carry it with him as he ran. His fingers were shaking too severely to open the drawstring top.
    Lumbering footsteps sounded above, changing in pitch the way they do on stairs. For a moment they sounded like they were descending into the basement, and whether that was true or not he couldn’t stay in this house another second.
    Adam trusted his feet more than the knife. He donned his pack, yanked the sliding glass door open and dashed across the lawn, never looking back.
    He ran for a long time.

9
    Beth Lynwood pulled the blinds to dim the encroaching sunlight, then returned to her daughter’s bedside. She leaned down and kissed Raya’s hair, noting how it had been darkening from golden blonde to honey brown into her teens, as if the hair were trying to warn her that her daughter was changing, shedding the last light of girlhood. Even so, the scare Raya experienced earlier had temporarily reduced her in a way, offering Beth another chance to soothe her like she used to, when the girl was still just a little girl.
    ‘I love you, Ra-rah,’ Beth whispered, using Raya’s name for herself when she had been too young to pronounce it correctly.
    ‘Love you too. Wake me up soon,’ Raya mumbled without opening her eyes.
    ‘Just sleep. No one cares about the last day of school. You said so yourself.’
    Raya offered her a faint smile, and Beth hoped it was a sign that she was already letting go of the… event. She didn’t know what else to call it. Between Darren’s increasingly frequent late-night wanderings and Raya claiming to have received a series of threatening texts, Beth was beginning to wonder if they were coming down with a case of late spring fever. Hormones and Chad might explain part of Raya’s hysteria or nightmares, but what about Darren? What was his excuse for being out of bed until sunrise?
    She went into the kitchen to make coffee and thought about pregnancy, children and their parents. Raya had come early, easily, and unexpectedly, when she and Darren were still just twenty-five and living in their first house, the one he had purchased with a down payment from the trust his father had set up, which was really an early inheritance in disguise. Andrew and Eloise had borne Darren late in their own life, when Eloise was forty-two, his father in his mid-fifties. Andrew had suffered a heart attack and passed away when Darren was not yet finished with college. A meticulous man who had kept his affairs in order, and a husband who had not wanted to burden Eloise with financial management, something she’d never showed an interest in, Darren’s father had established individual trusts for the two of them.
    Eloise had spent the following fifteen years leading an active life, never remarrying but traveling with friends, taking dancing lessons, volunteering with the church, and all manner of other things to keep her busy until her health declined. She was still alive but Beth knew she would not be for long. She was eighty-five and succumbing to Alzheimer’s.
    As for Darren, Beth had been impressed when she met him. He studied without the benefit of self-mercy, rarely drank, never took drugs, and at the tender age of twenty he had big plans.