It wasn’t until I heard the key turning in the lock that I understood what she meant. I dropped Trina’s file and went to the door. The knob wouldn’t budge. She’d locked me inside the office. I swore under my breath and barely resisted the urge to kick the door. I was having trouble breathing all of a sudden. Stop being stupid, I told myself. You’ve got a cell phone and a land line. You’ve probably even got email here. You can get out. But part of my brain kept hearing the click of the key in the lock. It made me remember my mother, and that gave me chills. After my father died, the crazy ideas that had always swirled around her brain took on the force of a tornado. She would lock Claudia and me in a closet for hours at a time, muttering under her breath about keeping the bad people away from us. My sister and I would keep each other calm while she ranted. We reacted in different ways. Claudia gravitated to dark rooms and small spaces; I became claustrophobic.

It felt as if the air were being sucked out of the office. I darted to the window and pulled it up. An alarm immediately sounded, and I shut the window quickly. The alarm didn’t stop. I pulled open the window again and stared at the ground. It was only a drop of four feet or so, and everything was covered in snow. I pushed myself up to sit on the windowsill, swung my legs around, and jumped. The snow made my initial landing a soft one, but as I crashed through it something hit my legs and clawed at my face. I fought back, realizing belatedly that I was caught in a bush. I extracted myself from it as it scratched at my face and hands, staggering in the snow.

“Put your hands up in the air,” ordered a voice I didn’t recognize. I turned and saw Zelda’s houseboy with his gun in his hand.

CHAPTER 34

At the police station, all I could think was that Claudia would laugh her head off if she could see me now. First tumbling out a window and held at gunpoint, then cuffed and tossed into the back of a police car, and finally praying to be bailed out at the police station. I’d made my one phone call already. “You got yourself arrested?” Jesse had said, sounding shocked and oddly delighted. “Holy hell, Lil. When you’re bad, you’re bad.”