Hidden Treasure

Hidden Treasure

The creak of the stairs did little to muffle the thump and scrape of the chair. I’d tied the restraints on her hands and legs as tightly as I had dared, so if she tried to pull free, as I knew she would, she’d be more likely to topple over than escape. As I paused on the top step, less than a few feet away from her bedroom, I thought that she must be realising this too. The sounds of struggle had ceased.

Perhaps she had inspected the rope more closely, noticed how thick, and fibrous it was.

Perhaps she’d felt the bite of it against her wrists, and thought better of splitting the pale peach of her skin. Or perhaps she had noticed my use of constrictor knots. I’d practiced making them every night this week.

She will see I’ve done my research. She will know I mean business.

I need to remember that too.

My feet stuck to the wood of the stairs, a sticky, tar-like substance seeping from my pores, preventing me from lifting my leg. I wanted to reach the landing. I wanted to walk into that room. I wanted to face her.

But I knew that if I took that step, there would be no going back.

The substance smelt like fear. It tasted like guilt. It was made of my tears, my anger, my pain. I was bound by what if, held still by maybe not.

My hand found the solid wood of the banistair, gripping tightly. Tendons flexed. With my other, I found the long, dark braid that fell down my chest. I felt for the ribbon there, shiny pink satin sliding between my fingers.

Raising my foot, I stepped onto the landing, pushing my doubts away.

She was the prisoner, not me.

Light shone from beneath her door, illuminating particles of dust floating in the air around my dirty black trainers. I turned the doorknob, walked inside.

Tamara ‘Tammy’ Gentle, was sitting in the centre of the room, red eyes wide and wet. The gag in her mouth was damp with saliva, and her lips fluttered around it when she caught sight of me. A flood of relief passed across her face, her shoulders clad in her favourite pleather top sagging forward.

I’d never seen that expression on her before, certainly not when she’d looked at me.

She nodded her head at her ties, shifting in her seat so that it lifted ever so slightly, banging against the floor as it had before.

Untie me, she was saying. Help me.

I walked behind her, ghosting my fingers over the knot in the gag before slowly undoing it.

“Oh my God,” Tammy gasped, her voice high and quaking. “Lee! Oh my God. You have to help me. I don’t know how this happened, h-how I got here but please, please help me. Untie my wrists! I don’t know when he’ll be back, or where he went. You’ve got to help!”

“He?”

Who did she think had done this to her?

“He, she, they, who the fuck knows!” Tammy craned her neck around, nostrils flaring. Blonde curls swept over my hand. I let the gag drop. “I didn’t see who it was, but let’s be fucking real, it’s always a man! I don’t know what he wants with me I don’t-”

“Tammy.”

She stilled at the sound of my voice, her fingers twitching.

“You’re not untying me,” she whispered. “Why aren’t you untying me?”

I walked around to face her, trying to keep my expression carefully neutral.

You have the power here, not her.

But it wasn’t easy. Too many years living under Tammy’s reign of terror in school had taught me never to underestimate her. There were mean girls, there were bitches, and then there was Tammy.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

Her lips trembled, and I could hear the wheeze in her chest as she inhaled. Blue eyes flew over my face, my clothes, my hair. Was I imagining it, or did her gaze linger for a second too long on the ribbon at the end of my plait?

“I need- here.” I patted the pockets of my cargo shorts, finding my inhaler on the second try. The rattle echoed in the small room. Lifting it to her lips, I nodded and pushed the canister down. Her lungs expanded. She held her breath, then let it out slowly.

The vein in her neck pulsed, rabbit fast.

“Untie me,” she croaked.

I shook my head.

Tammy squeezed her eyes shut, squeezing the arms of her chair.

“I need to talk to you,” I said again, doing my best to ignore the shaking of her legs.

“You already said that.”

“Well-” How to start?

“You couldn’t have spoken to me in school? In class? In the cafeteria?”

My face twisted. “You wouldn’t have spoken to me there.”

She stared. Her legs stopped shaking, just for a moment. “I’m speaking to you now.”

“Yes.” Yes. She’s here, bound to a chair. She’s helpless. So ask her.

I found my tongue too heavy to use. It got caught up behind my teeth, plump flesh ripping against the sharp edges of my molars. Copper flooded.

What if…

Tammy narrowed her eyes. “Why am I here, Lee?”

Maybe not…

“Lee?”

When we were ten, you pinned me to the ground and made me eat worms till I was sick.

“Uhh, Lee?”

I saw you throw rocks through Mindy’s window when we were twelve. You threw rocks until you hit her budgie. Until you killed it.

“Lee, why the fuck have you tied me up?”

Because you were always looking for someone to hurt, and then you found her.

I swallowed. “Where were you the night of July 8th?”

It had been a warm night. Too warm. I’d kicked Emma out of my bed when she’d crawled over to me. Her hair was so long. It reached the backs of her knees. She had refused to let my mother cut it since her third birthday and now, at eight years old, it needed braiding every morning to keep it free from snags. It was thick and smelled like apple blossoms, and I couldn’t stand to have it anywhere near me.

“It’s too hot,” I’d said. “Go away.”

I had meant - go away for now, just for a little while, just for tonight.

But when she left, she never came back.

That was two weeks ago.

“What the hell is this?” Tammy had squared her shoulders. The leather fabric stretched against her growing confidence, and I felt the playing field shift beneath us, tilting in her favor. Her top emphasised the lift of her breasts, a slip of skin visible at her midriff.

This was how she always dressed, like she understood and enjoyed her figure.

I felt all too aware of the hole in the neck of my grey t-shirt, the dirt on the fringes of my shorts.

You have the power.

“This,” I said, pulling over another chair I’d left in the room, ready for this very moment, “is an interrogation.”

The back of the chair faced Tammy. I straddled the seat, realising too late that its back was a little too high. I looked at her through a set of six wooden spindles, as though we faced one another through prison bars.

Who sat on which side?

I turned the chair around, pretending I didn’t hear Tammy’s amused snort.

You are in control here, not her.

“Lee,” she said, “let. Me. Go.”

My legs were crossed. Uncrossed. My arms folded.

I wanted to unfold them.

I didn’t want her to laugh at me again. I wasn’t sure what I would do if she did.

“Where were you the night of July 8th?”

Tammy rolled her eyes. “At a party.”

“Whose party?”

“You know whose party.”

“I want you to tell me.”

She sighed, cracking her neck. “Can’t we continue this conversation without the ties?”

I said nothing.

“Jesus Christ, Lee. I was at Dean’s party, wasn’t I?”

“You say that like I was there too.”

“Everyone was there.”

“I wasn’t.”

I was never there. She knew that.

Tammy chewed on her cheek, then laughed. “I’m here because of Dean’s party?”

She still didn’t get it. I reached past her, collecting the pen knife I’d left on her desk. The metal scraped across the surface as I dragged it towards me.

“You’re here,” I said, feeling like I might be sick, like I might hit her, like I might cry, “because of where you went during Dean’s party. You’re here because of what happened after.”

I flipped the blade out of its handle.

Tammy pursed her lips, eyeing the knife in my hand. She knew I wasn’t going to use it to cut her ropes, but she couldn’t yet be sure what I would use it for.

I wasn’t sure myself.

To intimidate her? To scare her?

“After the party I went home,” she said, her gaze flickering between me and the knife.

“Try again.”

It hadn’t taken a great deal of digging. Tammy was well-loved, but she wasn’t well-liked. It was like that for any bully. More than one person at Dean’s party had seen her leave early, returning with dirt on her dress, a smear of what they thought had been red lipstick on her brow. As if someone like Tammy would apply her makeup so haphazardly. I’d taken my suspicions to my parents, and when my mother cried and my dad left the room, I took them to the police.

They asked me why.

Why, why, why?

Apparently it was called a motive.

Why would Tay Valley’s golden girl abduct a child?

I said, “why do bad people do bad things?”

They asked me to leave.

I spoke to more of our classmates.

They said -

“Tammy came back for Dean. He ended the party and they went off into the woods.”

They said -

“Dean ended the party well early. It was weird. Him and Tammy were acting weird.”

They said -

“I heard her tell him she had a surprise.”

“I told you,” Tammy whined, “I went home.”

The knife shone in my hand, catching the sunset falling across the window. I flipped it in my hand. Again. Again. I shifted closer to her in my chair.

“L-Lee, come on.” Her breath hitched. It was the same noise my sister had made when I told her to go away.

I told her.

I told her to go away, and she didn’t come back.

My bedroom faced the main street, so all I could hear were passing cars. Emma’s faced the garden. It was a large garden, my mother’s pride and joy. She was always out there weeding, planting. Emma was always with her. When she couldn’t sleep, sometimes Emma would go out into the garden. The same garden that backed onto Dean’s house.

“That’s a lie,” I ground out. “You didn’t go home. You left the party early. You walked out of Dean’s garden and into mine. You saw my- You saw- And you took-”

She was wheezing again, shaking her head.

“I didn’t,” she was saying. “I didn’t.”

Once, when we were fourteen, I ran into Lila in the girls bathroom. She had been Tammy’s best friend for the past year, and had lasted far longer than any of the others. I’d literally run into her. Her face had been streaked with thick black tears, mascara clumping her eyelashes together, and we had collided as she’d left a bathroom stall. Her hand had been dripping blood, and it smeared all over my white school polo-shirt.

Behind her, Tammy had walked out the same stall, gripping a bloody pencil.

“An accident,” Lila had whispered, and I’d known to keep my mouth shut.

In front of me, Tammy was still wheezing. Perhaps, if I did nothing, her face would turn the same shade of red as Lila’s bloody hand.

I rattled the inhaler, held it out to her, but she flinched away from me, from the knife in my other hand. I put the blade down on the table, holding out the medication.

Tammy leaned forward, breathing in one puff, two.

On the second night of Emma’s disappearance, I overheard my parents talking to the police. I heard them say they were doing everything they could. They told my dad the whole town was working together to bring Emma home. They said “we will find her.”

They shouldn’t have said that.

Later, I read that ninety percent of children died within the first twenty-four hours of being taken. I read that most child-abductions were committed by someone known to the child.

Later, I smashed a window.

Later, I took my dad’s penknife.

Later, I made a plan.

“Tell me the truth.”

My voice wobbled. I hated that it wobbled.

“I am!”

Tammy was crying.

“You’re not.” I held the knife up to her throat; changed my mind; held it to her chest; moved it to her stomach. “Dean said-”

“Dean?! Dean!? That fucking- He said? And you believed him?”

She was pulling in her tummy, forcing her abs to contract as far away from the point of the knife as she could.

I gripped the handle more tightly. “You told him you took her. That night. You told him.”

The tears fell from her face in earnest. “No, Lee. No. Don’t you see? You stupid, stupid- Why would he point the finger at me? Why would he tell you that? Why, Lee?”

Why? Why, why why.

“I was scared, Lee,” he’d said. “She threatened me. Threatened my family.”

But why, why, why?

“We need a clear motive, Miss Moor,” the officer had said. “A real one.”

“Lee!”

My hand had slipped, the blade slicing down Tammy’s stomach. Blood welled, soaking into the top of her white skinny jeans.

“Fuck.” I dropped it. The metal hit the floor with a loud clatter.

My hands caught in my hair, nails scraping against my scalp. Tammy was telling me to let her go, let her go, let her go. I found the silk of the ribbon at the bottom of my braid, tugged it loose, let my hair spill around my shoulders, let the ribbon fall to the floor. My chest was tight. It hurt, taking my breath away.

There was a bang.

Tammy had tipped her chair onto the floor, her hands within reach of the knife.

I didn’t have time to grab it, couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to.

My chest. My chest.

“Tammy took her,” Dean had said, his brown eyes wide with fear. “I didn’t know what the fuck to do.”

“Why?” I had asked him. “Why?”

Dean had looked away from me, a shiver wracking his body.

On the floor of Tammy’s bedroom, ropes lay scattered. Spatters of blood pooled on the floor, stains of red soaking the restraints. I heard the pounding of her footsteps on the stairs. They matched the pounding beat of my heart.

I reached for my inhaler, shook it, pressed the canister, breathed in.

Nothing.

The tightness in my chest only increased.

My hands felt across Tammy’s desk. I pulled out drawers, tripped over to her bedside table, opened boxes and searched under her pillow.

She had to have one too.

But there was no inhaler to be found.

Sirens rang in the distance, the peeling, high-pitched wail setting my teeth on edge.

Has Tammy called them already? What would she tell them? What would I tell them?

They would never believe me now.

My chest.

I staggered across Tammy’s room, aiming for the door but walking into the side of her wardrobe instead, my vision hazy. The floor came up to meet me faster than I expected, and pain bloomed down my side, across my head, through my wrist.

The sound of the sirens was deafening. Lights flashed across Tammy’s walls.

I curled into a ball, unable to stand, unable to speak. Blue flooded the floorboards; blue, and a flash of pink.

Emma had always loved when I’d braided her hair. Me, especially. She always asked for me when mum or dad tried to brush it. It was our favourite morning routine, picking out her hair accessories, and even though we always knew she would pick the pink ribbon, we both pretended to take our time in deliberating.

I reached for that pink fabric now, the satin soft between my fingers, but something held onto it. The ribbon was stuck between two floorboards.

Chest heavy, I crawled to my knees, bending forward and pulling the short stub of ribbon with both hands. It came loose, bringing one of Tammy’s floorboards with it.

I stared at the fabric in my hand.

This ribbon was smaller than mine. This ribbon was darker than mine. I blinked, realising my ribbon still lay a few metres away.

The floorboard sat on its side, unaware of the treasures it had been hiding. As the flashing blue of the police cars slid by Tammy’s house, the sound of the sirens lost to distance, I finally saw it.

“Why?” I had asked Dean.

“Bad people do bad things,” he’d said.

I reached into the hole in the floor with shaking hands. The box I picked up rattled. It rattled like the inhaler, a last gasp of air, the truth shaken free.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

Tammy stood in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her coming back up the stairs. In one hand, she held a pair of pliers, the metal crusted with a dark scab of dried blood. In the other, she gripped a long braid of dark hair.

“I wanted to make sure they were the same length,” she added, holding the hair aloft. “You know, so they match, even after you’re gone.”

The box dropped from my hands with a clatter, my little sister’s teeth rolling around inside it.