Candace stood in the oversized window, her hands clutched to either side of the casement. She was trying to step onto the slippery shingles, but she couldn’t find her footing.
Freddie and I yanked at the iron latches on our window till they gave, but snow and ice had the frame frozen in place.
My eyes flicked back over to Candace. She was lowering one knee onto the roof.
We slammed the heels of our hands against the old wood. It only took a few hits before the top of the old frame popped out of the casing. Glass shattered. We hit the bottom of the frame a few more times before the entire piece toppled and slid down the roof, tipping off the edge into nothingness.
“Candace!” I shouted. “What are you doing? Get back inside!”
Her eyes flicked to mine. She had been watching the window fall.
It was hard to tell in the dark, but I could have sworn I saw her mouth the words Help me.
“I’ll go around,” Freddie said quickly. “Find what room she’s in.”
“Go. Go.”
Candace now had one hand and one knee on the roof. It looked like she was trying to ease the other half of her body out.
“Stop! Don’t do it! You’ll fall!” But the look on her face told me she already knew that. She also looked like she was about to say something more, but something or someone caught her attention from inside. She looked back into the room and then back at me saying nothing. My guess was that it wasn’t Rhonda behind her. Someone was making her do this. Thoughts raced in my head. Candace was drunk. She was upset. And now she was about to fall off the roof. It might look like an accident, but more likely, it would look like suicide.
“Hang on! Help is coming!”
Candace’s head whipped around again. Oh God! The killer had heard me. I clutched the sides of my head. I had to do something! I looked frantically around the room. I needed a rope or—
Just then I heard Candace scream.
“No!”
She slid a foot or two before her feet caught the top of what looked like a wide dam of ice running across the bottom of the roof.
“Come this way,” I said, holding out my totally useless hand to her. I say totally useless because she had to make it a good twenty, thirty yards across the span of roof that bridged the two sides of the estate before I would even be close to reaching her.
“I don’t think I can make it!”
“Okay … just … just … hang on.” My hand dove into my jacket pocket for my phone. Fire truck. We needed a fire truck with a big ladd—
I heard a really disturbing crack.
“Erica!” Candace screamed. “The ice is breaking.”
Okay, no time for fire trucks.
“You need to move toward me. I’ll … I’ll find something to pull you in!”
I swung my head around. My eyes landed on the bed. A fully made bed. I yanked the heavy quilt down and starting tearing the sheets off the mattress. I tied two of them together into a knot that was not at all reassuring and ran back to the window. “Candace!”
I flung the sheet toward her.
My throw did nothing. Absolutely nothing. The sheet just flared out and went nowhere.
“Dammit!” I yanked the sheet back in and tied a knot in the bottom end to give it some weight. I tossed the makeshift rope out again. It went farther this time, but nowhere near far enough.
Suddenly I heard a new voice shout, “Oh crap!”
Freddie was leaning out from the window Candace had climbed out of.
“Hang on, Candace!” he shouted. “I’m coming!”
“No!” Candace and I shouted at the same time.
“It’s too icy on that side of the roof! Where are the Arthurs?”
“Gone. Not here. I don’t know!”
“Fire truck!” I shouted, throwing my sheet rope again, but I knew it was useless. She had shimmied her way closer to my side of the roof, but she was still too far. “We need a fire truck!”
“There’s no time for that!” But a moment later I heard Freddie shouting into his phone.
Another deep crack sounded on the roof.
“Erica?” Candace’s trembling voice called out.
“Just keep moving this way. I can almost reach you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I can.”
“Yes you can! You’re almost there!”
“No I can’t.” Her voice had gone shaky like she might be crying or hyperventilating. “I think I might be sick.”
“Candace! Look at me!”
Her too wide eyes met mine.
“You can do this. Keep moving.”
“She’s right. You can do it!” Freddie shouted.
She eased her way along the edge of ice.
It was working.
She was going to make it. She was—
Just then the loudest crack yet tore into the night.
Candace screamed.
Frick! That sheet of ice, her foothold, was going to slide right off the roof any second.
“The vent!” I shouted. It was one of those old, rusted-out-looking things with the spinning tops. “Grab it! It’s by your left knee!”
Candace tilted her head down to see what I was talking about. It looked like she was trying to lift her foot up to step on it, but just then the dam that had been supporting her weight gave out. The enormous field of ice slid off the roof with the roar of an avalanche and crashed below. Candace scrabbled against the shingles but slid after it spread-eagled. Thankfully, the vent caught her under the arm.
“Candace?”
She didn’t answer.
“Candace, you need to stay with me, okay?”
“I … I don’t think this can hold me. The metal’s bending.”
“Hang on.” I grabbed the sheet for another throw.
Please let it reach. Please.
I hefted the rope of sheets down the roof.
“Dammit!”
It was still a couple of feet short.
“Erica? This isn’t going to hold! I can feel it going.”
I quickly wrapped one of the bedsheets around my waist and tied it in a knot. I tied the other end to an antique radiator by the window. It looked more decorative than anything else, but it felt solidly anchored to the wall. I did not like this idea. In fact, I was pretty sure this was a terrible idea. I’d had a really bad experience with heights not that long ago. In fact, I was pretty certain I was developing a solid phobia.
But I didn’t have time to come up with anything better.
“I’m coming!”
I propped my knee up on the sill of the window, grasping the middle divider of the casement that was still intact.
“Erica?” Freddie shouted. “What are you doing?”
I slowly angled my body out onto the roof. Gritty dirt and shingle scraped at my knees, but, on the bright side, soon I’d be too cold to feel it—and after that I’d probably be dead. So there was that.
I shuffled down the sloped roof, my toes bending in my boots at crazy angles to keep me from sliding.
“Hurry!” Candace shouted.
The slope of the roof felt much steeper than it had looked from the ground.
Why … why was the roof so steep?
Then it happened.
I knew what would happen as soon as my toe touched the spot, but it was too late to rebalance my weight. Ice. I had stepped on an ice patch.
Once my momentum got going, there was no stopping the slide.
Oh God, please let the knot on the radiator hold. Please let it hold.
I gripped the bedsheet in my hands to lessen the impact on my waist.
Oof!
Okay, that hurt. But I was not dead.
I looked over my shoulder.
And Candace was a lot closer.
“Oh my God! Erica!” Freddie shouted. “Would you be careful!”
“I’m trying!” I yelled back through my clenched teeth.
“I’m coming back around! Don’t move!” Freddie ordered. “If you die, so help me…”
His voice trailed away as he disappeared from the window.
“Grab my ankle!” I shouted down at Candace.
“What?”
“Grab my ankle! Climb up my body!”
“I don’t think I can.”
“You don’t think you can? You don’t think you c—” Huh, okay, she didn’t think she could. I kind of wished she had told me that before I came out here! But whatever. “Candace, you have to try!”
I suddenly felt something smack against the heel of my boot. I tilted my head down to see. “That’s it! Grab my ankle.”
Candace did grab my ankle, but I knew right away it wasn’t going to work. The boot was too thick and too heavy. It was going to come right off. “Wait! Stop!”
The boot gave. I heard it bounce down the roof and over the edge.
Thankfully, Candace had enough of a hold on the vent that she didn’t go with it.
“I can’t do this, Erica.”
Oh boy, I did not like the sound of her voice at all. It sounded an awful lot like the voice of someone who was giving up.
Gah! I rotated my body around on the roof in my best Spider-Man impression so that I could face Candace. “Look at me.”
Candace turned her tear-filled eyes up to mine. Smeared makeup and hair covered her face.
She was so at her end.
“You are not alone.” I stretched my hand out to her as far as it would go. “We are going to do this together.”
She opened her eyes and nodded. I think she even might have moaned something like okay.
It was a good thing, too, because next I was going to tell her how I was going to throw her off this roof myself if she didn’t listen … and I wouldn’t have wanted those to be my last words. We were friends.
Candace swung her free hand up to meet mine. Her palm landed on my wrist. Her fingers curled around it.
“Good. Good,” I said. “Now use my weight to get your foot up onto that vent.”
She did just that and not a moment too soon because I was pretty sure the sheet around my waist was crushing all of my internal organs.
“Okay,” I said, taking a breath while trying to inch my way back toward the window. I wrapped both of my hands around her wrist as she brought her other hand up too. “Now, we just have to—”
“Erica!”
I screamed.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Jesus. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Rhonda. It was just Rhonda. Rhonda was in the window I had come from.
“Help,” I mumbled. “Help us.”
“Oh right.” I felt the sheet tighten again around my waist. “Freddie,” Rhonda shouted. “Get over here and help me pull them up.”
The sheet cut into my waist just above my hips, but it was twisting too. “Easy, guys! Easy! I can feel one of the knots slipping.”
They stopped pulling, but I could still feel the slip of the knot giving way. “Guys! Guys! I’m falling. I’m—”
Suddenly I jerked up quickly. The motion caused the knot to give, but just then something cold and hard snapped around my bare ankle. Handcuffs?
“I’ve got you,” Rhonda shouted. “You’re not going anywhere unless you take me with you.”
Or my foot pops off.
Bad thought, Erica. Bad thought. Not helpful.
“Okay. Okay,” I muttered. “Candace, you need to climb up my body.”
Candace scraped against the roof, but she was getting nowhere. My hands were slippery with sweat. This was so not good.
“I can’t do it! I’m going to fall!”
“Yes you can. Now listen to me. We are fine. You’re fine! I’m fine! We are both fine.”
“What?”
“Actually we are better than fine. We are young. We are single.” Some of us more newly single than others. “And we are at a fancy New Year’s party!”
“Erica,” Freddie said with lots of worry in his voice, “you okay?”
“Haven’t you been listening? I’m fine! In fact, I’m freaking great!” I shouted. “You know why?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
I tried to shoot Freddie a look, but Candace caught my attention mumbling something. “What?”
“Why? Why are you great?” she asked weakly.
“Oh. I’ll tell you why I’m great. Because you and I are going to get ourselves back inside. We are going to drink some freaking champagne. Well, maybe not you. You’ve had enough. And we are going to talk about how awesome this upcoming year is going to be! Okay?”
She was quiet for a moment then finally said, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
She let one hand go from my wrist and reached up to grab my jacket higher at the armpit. It had a lot of give, but I was helping to push her up as I hissed, “Ow. Ow. Ow,” under my breath. Wow, that handcuff hurt.
“Candace!” a new voice shouted. “Oh my God!”
“Bethanny?” Candace answered.
“What’s happening? Help her!”
“We’re trying,” Freddie grunted.
Candace’s feet scrabbled against the roof trying to find purchase. And her right one did. At the back of my head. Mashing my cheek into the shingles. As I lay on the roof like a flattened frog, Candace managed to haul herself up onto my body, wrapping her arms around my thighs. In all the scenarios I had imagined for myself tonight, I never once thought I’d end up in this position. Literally, this position never once crossed my mind.
Suddenly I noticed Candace had stopped moving.
“I’m stuck!”
“Hurry,” Rhonda grunted. “I don’t know how much longer my arm can hold Erica like this.”
What the heck did that mean? I tried to shout What? but it came out all wet and muffled with the corner of my mouth pressed against the roof.
“Just a little farther,” Freddie shouted. “I’ll grab your hand. I can almost reach you.”
“I can’t,” Candace moaned. “I’m barely holding on.”
She was slipping too. I tried to grab her feet to give her some leverage, but they were flailing.
“Candace! Come on!” Freddie shouted. “You’re almost—whoa! Werewolf!”
And just like that all the weight was gone.
“Joey?” Candace breathed out the name like a woman who had just been rescued in a black-and-white movie … a woman safely tucked inside a building … while another woman was still lying precariously on a roof!
“Help!’ My voice cracked. “Help me.”
I felt the pull at my ankles. I tried to get up on my elbows to ease my way back so that my face wouldn’t get scraped off. Then as my legs tipped in the window, two very large hands gripped me around the waist and eased me all the way in. I went limp. Joey laid me gently on the floor. Rhonda had to go flat on her belly with me, what with her wrist still attached to my ankle.
I lay there, frozen, for a good long while, eyes closed, in that place where time has no meaning.
On some level, I registered Rhonda getting the cuff off her wrist, but the rest of the bracelet was still on my ankle. Guess she didn’t want to disturb me.
Suddenly a voice right above my face called my name.
I blinked my eyes open to see Freddie hovering above me.
“Erica? Are you okay?”
I mumbled something.
“What was that?” he asked, tilting his ear toward me.
“I said I freaking hate New Year’s!”
“She’s fine, everybody,” Freddie called out, getting to his feet. “She’s fine.”