thirty-seven

Veronica stopped banging on the iron bars of the jail cell as soon as she saw me. After a few seconds of the harsh sound echoing through the tunnels, the sound ceased. All was silent.

Olivia raised an eyebrow at me, while the kids stared open-mouthed from behind the bars of the Shanghaier’s cell.

I mentally kicked myself. Everything that applied to Sam Strum also applied to his aunt Olivia. Olivia needed money for her medical treatments. Olivia was at the hospital at the same time as Charles Macraith. And sharing a house with her nephew, she would know about his local history research findings about the Shanghai Tunnels.

“Well,” Olivia said, “are you going to just stand there, or are you going to help me rescue the children?”

“Rescue them?” I repeated.

Olivia pursed her lips. “Did I give you too much credit by thinking you were an intelligent young woman?”

“Mr. Strum locked us up,” Brixton said.

“It was so creepy!” Veronica added.

“Wait,” I said. “Sam locked you up?”

“Give the lady a prize,” Ethan said. He stood with his back against a brick wall on the far side of the cell, mimicking a casual stance that was betrayed by the nervous twitches of his hands.

Veronica elbowed him. “Ms. Faust is here to help—um, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I said, eyeing Olivia.

“She’s not working with her nephew,” Brixton said.

“I didn’t know what Sam had done,” Olivia said sharply. “Are you going to just stand there, or help me unlock these cell doors?”

“Where’s Sam?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t hurt them,” Olivia said. “He just needed them out of the way. You don’t have to worry about him. He won’t be back.”

I wasn’t so sure. Regardless of what I thought, we had to get ourselves out of the tunnels. We were so far from fresh air that I didn’t know what would happen if we stayed there too long.

I joined Olivia at the metal door. “What have you tried so far?”

“Brute force. It didn’t work.”

I looked at my cell phone. No reception.

“Mr. Strum took the key with him,” Veronica said.

I tugged on the door. “What happened?”

“The last time we were here exploring—” Brixton began.

“Spelunking,” Ethan cut in.

“Yeah, spelunking,” Brixton said, rolling his eyes. “Well, we found some evidence that looked like there was modern Shanghaiing going on. Well, not Shanghaiing, exactly. Smuggling, though. That’s almost as cool, right? There was like a truckload of boxes from China. We thought Mr. Strum would think it was cool, ’cause of his interest in this stuff. So this morning when we got to school, we went to find him before classes started.”

“To tell him about what we found,” Veronica added.

Brixton gripped the bars. “He was totally into it. Said we should all ditch school today so we could show him what we found.”

“We thought he was cool!” Veronica said, stamping her ballet flats on the dusty cell floor. “A teacher ditching with us. That was going to be, like, the best story ever. Instead, he locked us up in here! Right after we showed him the hidden boxes! I couldn’t believe it. We totally thought it was a joke at first.”

As she spoke, I knelt down to examine the lock.

“When we saw that it wasn’t,” Brixton said, “I tried to hypnotize him.”

I glanced sharply at Brixton.

“I, uh, read about hypnosis online,” Brixton said. “But anyway, it didn’t work. He left us here.”

“Does anyone have a pocketknife?” I asked.

“Tried it already,” Ethan said, and Olivia held up a broken pocketknife.

Where had Dorian gone off to? He would be able to pick the lock, but he couldn’t reveal himself openly. If only I had the map he’d run off with, I could have made my way out of the tunnels to get help. The tunnels stretched on for miles in so many directions that I wasn’t confident I could find my way out without the map.

“Olivia,” I said, “how did you end up here?”

“After Sam left for the high school this morning, he came back to the house to grab a key. I didn’t think much of it until I looked out the window and saw the children in the car. I knew something was wrong. He’d been acting strange lately. I thought it was because he was tired from working two jobs. But when I saw what he was doing this morning, I began to put the pieces together …”

“So you followed them.”

“I don’t drive, you know. But I suspected where they were going. I took the bus to a tunnel entrance I knew about from Sam, and used the stories he’d told me to find my way here.”

“Could you find your way back to get help?”

She hesitated. “I followed the sound of Veronica banging on the bars with a brick. But without a sound to follow on the way back …”

“How did you find us here?” Ethan asked.

“Brixton’s mom called me, worried after she got a call that you were ditching school.”

“Why didn’t you guys call Max?” Brixton asked.

“I did. I told him my suspicions about Sam using the tunnels for smuggling tainted herbal supplements. He said he needed a search warrant to search Olivia and Sam’s house …”

“You broke into their house?” Brixton said. “Wicked.”

Olivia clicked her tongue.

Another, louder click sounded a moment later. Everyone froze.

“Sam?” Olivia called out, her body tensing. She wasn’t nearly as confident in her assessment of Sam as she wanted us to believe.

There was no reply.

“You see?” she said hesitantly. “He’s not here. He’s not going to hurt anyone.”

I could have pointed out that Sam had killed not once but twice—the first time accidentally killing Anna West, the second time deliberately murdering Charles Macraith, and a third death was only foiled because I’d found Blue in time—but I held my tongue.

“I don’t like it down here,” Veronica whispered. She tugged at the sleeves of her sweater, then wrapped her arms around herself.

“You found Sam’s map of the tunnels?” Olivia said to me. “Why didn’t you bring it with you?”

“I had to leave it behind.”

Olivia threw her arms into the air, her shawl stirring up dust. She coughed before speaking. “We should split up. That way one of us should be able to find our way out of here and get help.”

“We shouldn’t split up,” I said. “We can’t be sure Sam isn’t coming back.”

“I told you,” Olivia said, “he wouldn’t hurt them.”

“Only imprison them.”

“He only did this to help me!” she said. “I knew he had gotten extra money to help pay for my experimental treatments abroad, but I thought it was Blue who was paying him generously because she knew about our money troubles. He never meant to hurt anyone! He would never have hurt anyone on purpose. He couldn’t have known he’d been lied to and given tainted herbs.”

Ethan put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. “Can we focus here?” The normally unfazed boy was visibly rattled.

“I have an idea,” I said. “Give me one second.”

I retraced my steps into the darkened portion of the tunnel. I was hoping it was Dorian who’d made the sound in an attempt to draw me out into a private meeting. I walked forward a few yards until I was out of earshot.

“Dorian?” I whispered. “Dorian?”

Nothing.

I waited for a few moments, but didn’t dare go forward for fear of getting lost.

“Dorian?” I tried one last time.

I sighed and walked back to the group.

“Well?” Olivia said. “What was your brilliant idea?”

“I thought I remembered which way to go,” I said. “But I was wrong.”

“Looks like we could use these,” Brixton said, pulling a bag out of his backpack. It was filled with a dozen chocolate date balls. He took one and passed the bag around.

Dorian had made the dessert treats. He’d made an awful mess of the kitchen at the time, searching for flour that I didn’t have. Instead of abandoning the ingredients he’d already mixed, he’d experimented without expectations and was able to create something even better than he’d initially envisioned. I breathed in the dusty air as an idea tickled the back of my mind. Giving up on expectations was exactly what I needed to do here.

“I’ve got it,” I said, looking from the lock to the opposite side of the old jail cell door. The hinges were covered in rust. “Can I see that broken knife?”

Using the broken blade of the Swiss Army knife, I eased the pin out of the upper hinge. It made a horrid squeaking noise as it pulled out of its socket.

“No way!” Veronica said.

Ethan swore under his breath, mumbling something about how he should have thought of it himself.

“Mwmsm,” Brixton said through a mouthful of dessert.

Olivia held the door as I removed the second hinge pin. Together, we swung open the door in the opposite direction than was intended.

Veronica leaped out of the cell and gave me a hug. “Thank you, Ms. Faust!”

“Now we can all get lost together,” Ethan said.

The bright light of a flashlight came around a corner.

Veronica shrieked like a banshee, causing the boys to cover their ears.

Olivia and I stepped instinctively in front of the kids.

“He wouldn’t …” Olivia whispered.

It wasn’t Sam who came into view. It was Max. I let out a sigh of relief. Max’s shirt was askew and his chest heaved. He must have been running.

“You’re all okay?” he asked.

His eyes locked on mine while everyone spoke at the same time to say they were all right. I barely heard them. At that moment, I was no longer in a claustrophobic tunnel, surrounded by three teenagers and the aunt of a murderer, with a gargoyle somewhere in the shadows.

“Thank God,” Max said, his eyes never leaving mine. He took a step forward and pulled me into a kiss. His lips tasted of licorice and spearmint. I found myself lost in the intensity of the kiss, something I hadn’t felt in nearly a century. The feeling scared me. I wasn’t afraid of Max himself, but the idea of Max. It was too much. We were too different. He was a skeptic who would never accept me if he knew the real me. I pulled back. As I broke away, the look on his face surprised me. The confident, stoic cop was hurt.

“Mr. Liu!” Veronica said.

Max cleared his throat. “It looks like everyone is all right.”

“How did you find us?” I asked, clearing my own throat.

“An anonymous person left me a map of the tunnels with this section circled. It was accompanied by a note saying I’d find Brixton, Veronica, and Ethan here. Was that you, Olivia?”

“It wasn’t me,” she said.

“You don’t have to protect Sam any longer,” Max said. “We’ve got officers at the house arresting him.”

“I only figured out what my nephew was up to this morning,” she said, “and I have no idea who left you that map.”

I knew the answer. I wondered how many Portlanders had noticed a stooped, child-size figure using a bulky sweater to cover himself as he ran through the streets, taking a great risk to rescue us from the cavernous tunnels deep beneath the city.