Free House of Steel by Raen Smith Page A

the
house phone. The answering machine clicked on, Ann Jones prompting
her to leave a message.
    “No answer at home. Is she with Ben?” she
asked, clicking back through the contacts to find her parents’ cell
phone number. They had finally gotten a cell phone, albeit a shared
one, a few years ago after much cajoling from their three children.
She called the number only to hear her mom’s voicemail again.
    “Nothing?” Mark asked, looking back at
Delaney. His eyebrows disappeared beneath the darkness of his
shades.
    “That’s strange. They always answer that
phone. I remember once when Mom answered my call during a wedding.
She had whispered into the phone, telling me to call her back
because she was in church.”
    “Typical,” Mark replied.
    They rode in silence for twenty minutes,
Delaney still worrying over being unable to tell Mark what she had
witnessed. She had tried again, just like she did with calling the
police back at the shop. Every time her voice threatened to become
audible, her throat suffocated the noise, burying it deep inside
her. The memory of Gunnar would settle with Mr. Rowan, forever
wrapped in a sealed package. There were just some things in life
that were never meant to be said or remembered. Surely, Mark would
understand.

 
    12
     
    DAY 2: Friday, December 19 – 3:15 p.m.
     
    As she secured the door with the key, V
rotated her head into the pelting snow and torrential wind. She
wasn’t ready, yet, to go back to her apartment for the evening to
deluge herself into more research; her rented space was not exactly
what she considered a home. She hadn’t had a home since she was
fifteen, though, and quite possibly, she thought, as she crept
around Delaney’s backyard and onto the sidewalk, had never had one
at all.
    V’s childhood, of what she remembered, was
lonely and still. Her days often filled with being passed from one
neighbor to the next while her father was away, working tirelessly
to provide a “better life” for them both. As an adult, she still
didn’t know what that meant. Her dead mother was never spoken of,
her father never bringing home a replacement to dote on the
pixie-like child. Her parents, for all she knew, had abandoned her
to fend for herself.
    She grew quiet, watchful through school as
girls and boys played and teased each other. A self-inflicted
wallflower, she often wondered if she would blow away in the wind.
One day she had tried, jumping ten feet from a playground’s steel
support in a summer dress onto the pebbles below, but she had only
cut her knees instead, soaking small dots of blood through the
cotton. Her father had burned the dress when the neighbor woman he
paid to do their laundry hadn’t successfully removed the stains. V
had tried to blow away again the next day.
    Her only friend as a small child was a boy a
year older than herself who had come to live with her and her
father for a short time when she was five – Ethan, with a broken
leg and blue welts all over his scrawny body. They huddled together
for that year, Ethan teaching her how to play and fight back
against older kids, if trouble ever stirred. But for the
wallflower, trouble hadn’t arrived until she was fifteen, and Ethan
was long gone. She had returned to him some time after the summer
of two deaths – the black summer she now referred to it as – for
help and guidance; he had dutifully obliged.
    It had been years of silent preparation and
studying, anticipating the right moment for her revenge. She had
enrolled in basic nursing courses at the technical college near her
apartment, using the alias of deceased Jane Frieburg from Missouri.
Identity theft and tampering with the school’s recordkeeping system
had turned out to be an alarmingly simple, yet gratifying, task for
her. And the blood and needles, well, that had never bothered her.
The human body was an intricate system of organs and tissues,
fragile in its entirety.
    The target training at the same facility was
what she