Cora stopped with her finger pointed at Dillon’s chest. She brought her hand down like a shot and stepped back from him.
“I thought you knew,” he said. “I actually thought that’s why you had come to speak to me.”
Cora shook her head slowly.
“Your sister,” she repeated, disbelieving. Dillon nodded.
“I can’t believe she never told you.”
It took Cora a few seconds to gather in her head that all this was impossible. Well, at the very least improbable. She needed some answers.
“If she’s your sister, how come she never speaks to you?”
Dillon shook his head.
“We shouldn’t talk here.”
“Okay, so when-”
“Tonight, an hour after sundown.”
“What about Saskia? Or Alexia… there’s another question I need answered…” Cora mused.
“You’ll have to say you’re in the bathroom or something.”
Cora rolled her sea green eyes.
“Well, gee whiz, you really are creative. Alright, where?”
Dillon thought for a minute, and then clicked his fingers, as though the solution were obvious.
“The boiler room. Why would they send guards down that way?”
The sound of approaching footsteps alerted them to company and Cora ducked round behind the door.
A man’s voice came from just two feet away. It was Richard Cleaver, the head prison warden.
“Mr. Adams,” he addressed Dillon. “You should have left a while ago, surely?”
Dillon nodded, and pointed to an invisible problem with the hinges on the exit door. He cleared his throat awkwardly.
“I was leaving, but I noticed these hinges here were a bit, ah…loose.”
Cleaver nodded.
“That’s what I call a good worker,” he boomed jovially. “We wouldn’t want any of the delinquents in here to make a getaway attempt now, would we?”
Cora made a face. To the inmates, this guy was a tyrant, a bully. But to his employees, apparently he was a jolly father figure. She hated people like that. Two sides of the same coin. Right now, Cleaver was asking Dillon about his family. Cora could have laughed. If what Dillon was saying was true, his sister was in the very same building! Cora wondered what Cleaver would have to say about that if he knew. Eventually, Dillon managed to edge out of the door, taking Cleaver with him and allowing Cora to make a run for it. The convicts weren’t supposed to be in this ‘Staff Only’ corridor.
Cora barely made it back to the cell in time for her duties. Four hours of cleaning floors. Fun. She entered the tiny cell to find Saskia-or Alexia- lying on her bunk, reading a magazine. She looked up as Cora came in.
“Hey.”
“Hi.” Cora had great difficulty in keeping her mouth shut about Dillon. She wasn’t a patient person by nature and didn’t think she had what it took to wait until sundown to find out what the story was.
“Aren’t we meant to go on duty, like, now?” Cora asked her friend, who didn’t seem to have heard her. Cora rolled her eyes and sighed. She grabbed her regulation orange overalls and pulled them on over her sweats, getting ready for the chores ahead. Standing in front of the mirror again, she now found herself looking instead of at an unhappy, unwashed, lank head, at a rather pretty if not fed up young woman with bouncy, vivid red curls. Cora now pulled this hair back from her face and tied it in a messy bundle at the back of her head. She turned to look at Saskia.
“Are you coming or not?” she asked, placing her hands on her slim waist. Saskia gazed thoughtfully up at the barred window.
“I don’t think so,” she replied, after several moments. “Cover for me, will you?”
“But-”
“Thanks, hon.”
Cora folded her arms and shot daggers at her friend. There was no speaking to her in this mood; the girl was determined to make the most of the absence of the most strict warden.
“Fine.”
* * *
Cora cursed Saskia as she scrubbed the filthy floor of the canteen. With her, this job would go a whole lot quicker. The girl had been like a sister to Cora these past few months, but sometimes she could be a nightmare. Thinking about it now, she realised she didn’t know why Saskia was in jail. This was odd, because Cora had thought she’d known everything about her cellmate. Turns out she didn’t even know her name…
* * *
“Dillon!” Cora whispered in the murky dark of the apparently deserted boiler room.
“I’m here.” Dillon spoke softly as he flicked a flashlight on from about four feet away from where Cora was standing.
“You know,” Dillon mused, “You weren’t on your guard at all just then! If this was a horror film, and I was the murderer, you’d be toast.”
Cora grinned.
“Then it’s a good thing we’re not,” she retorted. Dillon cracked a smile.
“So what do you wanna know?” he asked, perching on the side of a long-since-abandoned desk.
Cora sat down on the nearest crate.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
* * *
“It all started when Alexia was just starting tenth grade. She started hanging with people who my parents just wouldn’t accept. They weren’t really as bad as they seemed, but the rumours were that they did drugs, drank, stole, vandalised…pretty much everything a bad person could do. But no matter what my parents said or did, they couldn’t stop Alexia doing what she wanted.”
“I can believe that!” Cora interrupted, giving a short laugh. Dillon smiled and continued.
“Well, one night the gang went up to the lake to mess around. This preppy guy, Willis Masterson from the year above Alexia, followed them there.”
“How come?”
“Story goes, he was going up to take photographs of the water for a project he was doing for extra credit.”
“And was he?”
“The guy didn’t even have a camera on him. I think he was spying for the principal.”
Cora was quiet, waiting for Dillon to go on.
“While Alexia and her friends were further round the lake, Willis got caught in some stray fishing line and tripped. He went head first into the deepest part of the water.”
Cora gasped. “What happened?”
“He couldn’t swim because the line was round his ankles and the more he struggled the more it tangled. But he was making such a noise that the guys heard him and they ran back to where he was. Alexia’s boyfriend, Travis, and his best friend Axel jumped in, swam down to get him and dragged him out while Al called 911 but it was too late.”
Cora frowned. “He died?”
Dillon shook his head. “Worse. The paramedics kept his heart rate going, but barely, and by the time he arrived at the ER, his brain had been so starved of oxygen that he slipped into a coma and didn’t wake up.”
Cora shook her head. “That’s terrible.”
Dillon nodded.
“His parents pay thousands of dollars every year for him to be kept alive at home, because they believe that he can sense the familiar surroundings, and one day he’ll wake up.”
“Do you think he will?”
Dillon paused. “I’m not sure I believe in miracles just yet,” he said, “but if I ever get my sister out of this place and back home where she belongs, ask me again.”
Cora nodded her understanding.
“That story doesn’t really answer my question, though,” she said.
Dillon rolled his impossibly brown eyes and looked at Cora.
“You told me to tell you everything,” he said, “and I understand it’s common practice to start at the beginning, yes?” Cora smiled.
“Alright, I’ll can it. Just spill!”
Dillon grinned at her and continued.
“After the accident, of course Alexia and her friends were treated like the bad guys. There were seven of them altogether that night, not including Willis, and not one of their lives didn’t change. In the sleepy town we lived in, it wasn’t surprising that any shred of gossip was clung onto and made more elaborate each time it was passed on, so it wasn’t long before the whole of Maine knew-”
“Wait a minute!” Cora interrupted. “Saskia said she was from California. You lived in Maine?”
“Alexia ran away to California…she’d always wanted to go there and finally had a chance when she ran away. We were born and raised in Maine.”
Cora nodded slowly. “I really don’t know her at all,” she said slowly.
“Anyway, there was an inquest and a trial, where each of the people there that night had to testify. They were expected to go up there several times over the course of the trial. Travis was excellent every time- cool as a cucumber. Axel got kind of aggressive with the lawyer a couple times, which didn’t make things any easier for him. Most of the others handled it just as you’d expect, but not Alexia. She went up to the bench once, and once only. She completely flipped out when she left the courtroom. My parents took her to a shrink and everything but nothing helped. She was either screaming at people or not saying a thing. We got really scared for her; we didn’t know what was going on! Then my parents began talking about sending her to a special hospital in Switzerland. A sort of clinic, to see if they could help her. I knew this was a completely stupid idea to approach Al with but they didn’t listen to me. The minute she realised they were serious, she got serious. She packed a bag and left in the dead of night, the week before she was due to leave. The next few weeks were horrible. Even the police couldn’t find her and we were even more worried because we didn’t think she was of sound mind, you know?”
Cora nodded once more, feeling speechless. Saskia had never once conveyed any of her past hurt to Cora and it made Cora feel guilty for not being there or something.
“Anyway, the next thing we hear is about six months after she went missing. By now, the police believed she and her friends had something to do with Willis’ accident because Alexia skipped town during the trial.”
“Didn’t it cross their minds she was afraid? I mean, she was only, what, sixteen years old?”
Dillon sighed. “Yeah. But I think they were under pressure to close the case and the idea the kids were involved made solving the ‘mystery’ a whole lot easier. It seemed to be the major public opinion”
“So what had happened to Saskia, what did you hear?”
“The call was from LAPD. She’d been stopped in the street by a cop who recognised her from a missing persons photo up in the station, and she pummelled him. I think she’d convinced herself that everyone thought she was guilty of murder or something. She had the hugest case of paranoia. So after she hit the cop he arrested her and she gave her name as Gwen McGee, from Southern California. She even had a fake ID. After she was released, it took the cops about a week to prove it was Alexia and re-arrest her, then they called us. I flew over to get her but she jumped out of the cab on the way to the airport.”
“She jumped?!”
“Yup. She got a broken wrist and fractured collarbone. It wasn’t one of her smartest ideas. So then she was sent to another psychiatrist, who she convinced she wasn’t crazy, but liable to commit more crimes, a danger to the public, you know the deal.”
“What could she possibly have said to make them think that?” Cora wondered aloud.
“I’ve given up guessing,” Dillon replied. “But the judge sent her to a juvenile delinquents’ home where she got into more fights before running away again.”
Cora raised her eyebrows. “You’re kidding!”
“Uh-uh. She escaped and I gather she returned to California, by the colour of her skin. We didn’t hear from her again, save one postcard. In two years we got one little piece of card, telling us she was okay. But then, I suppose she did something else wrong, because I come looking for her, working as a handyman in various places along the way, and one day I find my baby sister, staring back at me from across a dingy, stinking prison cafeteria. God only knows how she fooled them into thinking her name was Saskia Micaw! Shows how reliable the legal system is, huh?”
Cora shook her head slowly in sheer disbelief. She really couldn’t believe it.
“Do you know how it feels to see someone you love, someone who once had everything she’d ever need to reach her full potential, living in a hole like this? She’s my little sister, for God’s sake. She’s beautiful and smart and she didn’t even get the chance to finish school because she freaked out over a stupid hearing.”
Cora was silent. Dillon stood up and began wandering around the dimly lit room. Both of them jumped when the boiler hissed suddenly from the corner and Dillon spoke.
“You should get going,” he said quietly.
Cora stood up, but paused at the doorway.
“How come she hasn’t spoken to you? I mean, you’re her brother, right? She should be pleased you’re here.”
“If the guards here found out she wasn’t who she said she was, she’d get into a lot of trouble. And I don’t know what she did to get thrown back in jail. I don’t know how bad it was.”
Cora understood Dillon’s dilemma. She said goodnight, but not before arranging to meet him again, several nights later, and snuck back to her cell.
Saskia-Alexia-was sleeping, so Cora climbed onto her creaky bunk as quietly as she could. She lay awake for at least an hour, thinking about her conversation with Dillon. No matter how hard she tried, she found that all the information wouldn’t sink in. It was too much to hear in the space of thirty minutes. Saskia Micaw was really Alexia Adams, Dillon’s little sister. They didn’t like each other in that way after all, and Cora was shell-shocked after hearing all about her friend’s past. She really had had everything going for her, and all that changed over some off-the-mark rumours, a nosy kid and a stupid accident. It just wasn’t fair. Maybe the judicial system would get a little more accurate someday, but until then, Cora figured it was time for her to play Nancy Drew, and find out whatever the hell Alexia Adams had done to end up here. She owed her that much.
* * *
