Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘Hey.’ I unzipped the bag on the search table and nodded to the guard who resentfully got out of his chair at the monitoring station.

‘We’re having a jam session today. Want to come up to the third floor around three? It’s gonna be epic.’

The guard poked through the mess of tambourines, hand drums, sleigh bells, and whatever else I could find at the secondhand music store yesterday. ‘Um, I think I’ll pass.’

‘Your loss, man.’ I zipped the bag back up and flung it over my shoulder, heading for the employee locker rooms.

It was early enough that the night shift was still on, yawning into their sleeves and ready for the late winter sun to end their day. I nodded to a few of them and some even acknowledged me without smirking. Walking past the lockers, I took the bag through another exit into a stairwell and jogged down to the basement. There was no badge access down here and no video cameras as far as I could tell, so I set the duffel down and went to work on the lock. Twenty minutes later, just as I was starting to lose hope, the catch sprung and I swung the door open, peeking inside. A dim, open room housed a pile of miscellaneous furniture and on either side of the mess two hallways disappeared into blackness. I took the one leading right, mentally tracking the map of the building above me, until I got to the stairwell exit I wanted. Opening the duffel bag, I reached through to the bottom where I’d cut the lining, pulled out the tools I needed, and tucked them behind a dusty fire extinguisher.

‘See you in a few.’

Then I left the basement and started my shift.

JASON HOUSLEY – MY fleeting front desk friend – had worked as a second shift Congdon security guard since he graduated high school fifteen years ago. In the last few days I learned he liked to sit in the break room telling anyone who would listen that he made more money than half the guys he knew who had gone to college.

‘And no friggin’ loans to pay off, either,’ he’d add, slopping up whatever microwave meal he’d overcooked that day and filling the room with mystery meat or fake butter smells.

The picture on Jason’s security badge showed a not-bad looking kid trying to seem tough, probably taken a few days after he was hired. The real Jason had the shape and appeal of a rancid turkey. He was a mountainous, slack-jawed guy who’d harassed the only unmarried nurse until she’d threatened to go to HR and bragged to everyone about his pristine, collector-registered Pontiac Trans Am. He mattered to no one, which made him desperate to seem as important as possible. He always carried his flashlight out when he made rounds, scraping it along every door as he puffed and sweated through each ward. After I rejected his offer of a growler and a groping, he waited for me at night as I left the building, throwing out some bizarre comment he’d no doubt been refining all day.

‘You’re too late.’ He sneered from the monitor station today. ‘The high school let out already, so you missed all the underage boys.’

I didn’t slow down. ‘I prefer undergrads. All that sexy book learnin’.’

He grunted as I left, acting offended, like it wasn’t the highlight of his day someone actually talked to him, and today I was going to make sure of that.

On Monday nights, Congdon had late visiting hours, so there were still plenty of cars in the parking lot after five o’clock. I wove through the rows until I came to my beat-up Civic, parked right next to a shiny, black Pontiac Trans Am. The guard station faced the street, the protesters had all dispersed a few days ago, no one else was coming in or out of the building, and Jason had considerately parked his collector wheels right next to a giant spruce tree that blocked the view from most of Congdon’s windows. The car was backed into its spot and ready to floor it off the property. It was now or never.

I pulled a tire iron out of my trunk. The nicest thing about old cars was how easily everything came apart.

Six hours later I parked in an alley a block away from Congdon’s eastern fence. The building rose up over the top of the line of houses, a black silhouette towering at the crest of Duluth. I took a few deep breaths and stared at the outline of the institution that had given me a fresh start, not once in my life, but twice.

For the last several days I’d obsessed over the logistics of this kidnapping – the exact sequence of events and every tool I’d need – ignoring the hovering cloud of my betrayal. I wasn’t naive. I understood exactly what I was doing, the line I was crossing. No matter if I succeeded or failed in the next hour, the life I’d been trying to live was over. I was going to prove everyone right who’d whispered Dr Mehta was wrong to hire me, that once a mental health patient, always a mental health patient. The costume was gone, the show over. Just like my mother. I wondered if she’d been as sure as I was now, if she felt this thing in her core that told her she’d found a greater purpose. Maybe her abandonment of me was as inevitable as my abandonment of Dr Mehta and Congdon now. Maybe it wasn’t my fault she left. I would probably never know. And I’d never know if she took a moment like I was taking now, sitting in this car at the point of no return to face the roil of sorrow in my gut. Acknowledging the emotion, like I’d been taught to do.

‘I’m sorry, Riya.’ Dr Mehta’s first name felt wrong on my tongue and I embraced the alienness, the separation of what she’d been to me from what I had to become to her now.

I took one last giant breath before double-checking everything in my backpack and slipping out of the car. It was time. Lucas was waiting.

Cutting across the block to the sidewalk that bordered Congdon’s grounds, I glanced in the windows of nearby homes. Briskly, I paced to the far end of the block and checked the front gate, making sure no protesters had decided to make a reappearance, but the sidewalk in front of the guardhouse remained empty. I crept along the fence, to the spot where my shoes crunched over a pile of broken glass from the streetlights I’d knocked out last night. Hip hop thumped out an open window of a nearby house, but I didn’t see any movement other than a lone squirrel ducking through the fence’s iron bars. Pulling out a knotted length of rope from the backpack, I swung the looped side over the top of the fence and threaded the other end through, drawing it tight. I scaled easily up to the top and teetered there, carefully gripping the bars between the spikes to ease one foot over, then the other. Once I’d swung my weight over I grabbed the rope again and scaled down the other side, noting how much time it had taken while I tucked the trailing section along the fence. If someone searched the perimeter of the grounds they’d spot it, but to the casual observer it blended into the shadows.

I put on a full ski mask and cinched the hood up on my jacket. The gloves, baggy black sweatpants, and shoes had all been purchased at Goodwill, with cash. I crept through the grounds, sticking to the trees, until I had a view of both the isolation ward and the edge of the parking lot. There were no lights in the windows of the isolation rooms and I still didn’t know the night shift’s exact schedule to do their checks, but I did know when the shift changed.

At exactly 11:15, after the transfer of keys and notes, Jason Housley lumbered out to his Trans Am. I crouched under the bows of a pine, clutching Nurse Valerie’s badge, and held my breath. He started the car and floored the engine, then let it idle for what felt like an hour. Jesus, what was he doing in there? I couldn’t see him through the glare of the parking lot lights and started to get nervous. Could he tell something was wrong? He hadn’t hesitated before getting in the car. I edged to the far side of the tree, ready to run.