Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [45]
In the back of the café was a display case that held pastries: doughnuts, éclairs, croissants, giant muffins. A yeasty bread smell, combined with the scent of coffee, nearly overtook him, and for a moment he imagined grabbing a chocolate croissant off a woman’s plate and bolting outside.
Instead, he looked around the side of the display case, toward the back of the shop, for a computer.
There wasn’t one. How could this be a free-Internet café and not have a computer? On the wall he saw a small handwritten sign: WI-FI AREA. Oh, so you could have free Internet if you brought your own laptop. Figures! All the excitement he’d felt only moments ago leached out of him.
“You’re him!” He turned at the loud whisper. It was the girl he’d met on the street — again standing so close, he could count the freckles on her nose. She’d been following him!
“You’re the missing kid,” she gasped.
Jack felt like a kid in a game of tag, about to be marked it. He couldn’t catch his breath. He didn’t know what to say, couldn’t think. He pivoted from his left foot to his right and then ran, squeezing past tables and through crowds and out of the shop.
“Hey!” he heard her yell from behind him.
Jack sprinted past the rest of the storefronts on the block and down a side street before he paused to look over his shoulder. The girl was following him, and man, was she fast! There were no other roads shooting off the one he was on, and if his sense of direction was correct, this street would soon end at the ocean. Then what? A dog barked loudly, discouraging him from cutting across the unknown backyards. Instead, he suddenly reversed direction, clipping the girl with as much force as he could as he raced back up the hill, to the center of town, and ducked into a bookstore on the corner. A bell over the door jingled.
It was a smaller store than Jack expected, and, even though he could see instantly that it had lots of little nooks and crannies for sitting and reading, he knew he couldn’t hide in there for long. Fortunately, the one and only customer in the store — a man who rocked back and forth on his heels as he spoke — was trying to explain his needs to a woman behind the counter. Jack moved to a back corner of the store, which happened to be the children’s section, and sat for a moment in a small stuffed red chair to catch his breath.
He picked up a nearby graphic novel, hoping to look engrossed and be somewhat hidden if anyone else came into the store. He felt as if the girl’s shout and his tearing out of the coffee shop so quickly had alerted everyone to the fact that something unusual was happening in town.
And no doubt he’d made the girl mad when he’d clipped her. Come to think of it, that was pretty stupid. She’d probably gone straight to the police station to report her sighting.
The woman came out from behind the counter and led the man to some shelves at the front of the store. “We could put the display here,” she said.
Jack glanced around the bookshop for a rear exit. There was a curtained doorway in the back, but he doubted it led anywhere except to a closet-size office. But across from the counter was a partially open door — a heavy metal door. He decided to risk it. He could simply say he was confused if it led to a dead end.
Making as little noise as possible, he slipped through the open door and into . . . into what? What was this? There were boxes of books all around, but he was not in a typical storage room. Jack touched the walls — metal, too. He was in a . . . in a safe. Not a safe, a vault. The kind that he’d seen in a movie about notorious