Hideout Jack Heath (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

to do is come up with mental images to remind me of the gaps. For ‘relationship … emotional’, I picture Donnie hugging his girlfriend and sobbing loudly. For ‘His … Donald’ I imagine him taking Trump for a walk on a leash, like a pet he owns. And so on.

But I can’t burn this. It’s proof of something, although I don’t yet know what.

I tuck the papers under my shirt. The hot corners sting my skin. When I walk through the kitchen and dining area, Cedric and Zara aren’t there. Maybe they’ve gone to bed. I sneak back into my room and close the door.

I need to conceal these papers somewhere. But my room could be searched at any time. Perhaps it already has been. A normal hiding place—in a drawer, on a high shelf—isn’t going to work. I’d like to smash a hole in a wall, but that would wake up the whole house, and I don’t have the materials to patch it up afterwards.

As I walk around the room, looking for ideas, I feel a draft of warm air near my feet. I look under the bed. There’s a heating vent down there.

As quietly as I can, I drag the bed sideways to access the vent. I should be able to drop the paper in, then nudge it out of sight around the bend. Safe enough.

But when I lift up the grille covering the vent, I discover a plastic-wrapped bundle inside. It looks a bit like one of the shrink-wrapped T-shirts you see in tourist traps.

I lift it out. Inside the plastic I can see an ash-grey powder. It’s too dark to be heroin or cocaine.

Underneath, I can see a second bag, and maybe another beneath that.

Whose room was this before mine? Do the Guards know this is here?

I sniff the package but can’t smell anything through the wrapping. I give it a gentle squeeze and some little white granules come to the surface among the grey.

The realisation comes so suddenly that I almost drop the package.

CHAPTER 25

The more I eat, the fatter you get. You’ll see a picture of me, then we’ll meet in person, and you’ll cry. What am I?

Rick Allister married his high school sweetheart, Lynne, and started hitting her as soon as she was pregnant. The first time was when he caught her smoking on the back porch. He slapped her so hard that she fell off her chair.

Rick apologised that night. He said the thought of his baby boy inhaling her smoke made him crazy, although they didn’t even know the sex of the baby at that stage.

‘When we had the twelve-week sonogram, it turned out he was right,’ Lynne Allister told me later. ‘I know the odds were fifty–fifty, but it made him seem omniscient. Like anything I did, he would know about.’

We were at a diner around the corner from the FBI field office. Lynne kept watching the windows behind me, scanning every face. She was Asian American, twenties, with arched eyebrows and coffee-stained teeth. Under her hoodie, the tendons in her neck stood out, like she was braced for a car crash.

It was two days after the Hermann Park protests. The road was still sprinkled with broken glass and scorch marks. No agents had come with me to the diner. Everyone was busy sorting through all the photos and video of the protestors.

The second time Rick hit her, Lynne said, it was because she’d eaten some brie. It could contain listeria, he snapped, which would harm his baby. That time he didn’t apologise.

‘I asked a maternal health nurse, and apparently getting punched in the head is more likely to harm the baby than eating cheese.’ Lynne took a thoughtful sip of her coffee. ‘But then she said, “Still don’t eat any soft cheese, though.” Can you believe that?’

As her belly got bigger and bigger, she made more and more excuses for Rick. He was stressed. Their finances weren’t great. He was working long hours to support her. She thought he’d stop hitting her when the baby was born.

And he did—for a while.

‘That first month, it was as if we were in high school again. We were so in love. Whenever he was home, we just lay in bed together looking at Joey, like he was a beautiful painting we’d paid a lot of money for. Newborns aren’t hard. They just sleep all the time. But when he started to get more active, Rick started to have problems with everything I did. If he thought the bathwater was too cold, he’d dump a bucket of it on my head. If he thought I hadn’t mashed the baby food up enough, he would throw it at me. “This wouldn’t hurt if it was mashed,” he’d say. Or one time I put the diaper on too tight, and he came up behind me and grabbed my skull and just squeezed. “You like that? Huh?”’

Whenever Lynne quoted her ex-husband, her voice was a hoarse whisper. I couldn’t work out if she was doing an impression of him or was worried about other people in the diner overhearing.

‘But I couldn’t leave him,’ she said. ‘Where would I go? My parents were back in Delaware. My friends, too. I couldn’t contact them without Rick knowing, because we shared a phone and an email address. I couldn’t even write a letter, because he was with me every time I left the house. I tried to talk to a work colleague, but she didn’t seem to believe me. Later, I found out that Rick had warned her in advance that I had a history of mental problems. I know, I know.’ She held up her hands. ‘This is all starting to sound familiar, right?’

I nodded. ‘Textbook.’

‘I’ve been doing some research about other women in my position,’ she continued. ‘Their