The garage was paved with all-but-impervious quartzite and offered spaces for twelve vehicles, though only four were assigned to the live-in staff of the fake school. The northwest corner was occupied by an open workshop with built-in cabinets, workbench, and all kinds of tools racked on perfboard, everything clean and neat.
The garage was off limits to the kids. But Harley had been there a few times. The staff couldn’t do anything worse to him than what they had already done by imprisoning him. Their punishments didn’t matter to him: no dessert for dinner, stupid things like that. Until last December, he had been able to spend time here, but then something had changed; now they seemed to know the moment he stepped into the garage, and they came right away to get him.
The previous November, he’d hidden in the Cadillac Escalade, hoping someone would drive it out, not knowing he was lying in the cargo area behind the backseat. From that vantage point, he had raised his head to watch Noreen return from town in the Ford Explorer. She had unlocked one of the drawers that flanked the workbench and put the Ford key in there and locked it away.
Now, in their stocking feet, the eight inmates gathered in front of the workbench. Although the cabinets were well constructed, Harley believed he could quickly force the lock. From the array of tools, he selected a claw hammer and a screwdriver.
“No, no! They’ll hear,” Bobby Acuff fretted. “They’ll hear, and they’ll come, and they’ll kill us all.”
“They’re at dinner on the other side of the house,” Harley said. “The way I’m going to do it, they won’t hear.”
“They can hear as good as dogs,” Bobby Acuff said. “They hear stuff other people can’t hear. They hear everything.”
“Oh, please, Bobby, stick a sock in it,” said Jenny Boone. “Even if they hear, the most they’ll do is not give you any cake with dinner tomorrow.”
“No, they’ll kill us all,” Bobby insisted. “Just because they haven’t killed us until now doesn’t mean they won’t kill us when they want to.”