The Secret of Zormna Clendar by Julie Steimle (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

she was supposed to meet him here and they were going to go together. But Zormna could not see hide nor hair of Jennifer’s boyfriend on the school steps anywhere. She had told Todd she was going home with Kevin. Otherwise she would have lingered after school on the bleachers while Todd went to track practice and Jennifer had flags. But since Todd knew the plan, he told his friends that Zormna was taken care of.

When Alex and Jeff left, they cast her brooding looks as they drove off in Alex’s truck. Brian offered to wait with her, but Joy apologetically dragged him off saying they had to set up for the Young Men’s and Young Women’s activity at church. Then she offered for Zormna to come, if she wanted.

But Zormna turned her down, saying she had plans already.

And she waited, watching Mark trot off by himself with a wave. He had to get home to do homework. Darren even left without so much as a word. He looked rather subdued, actually. Hunching shoulders and furtive looks—like he was afraid Zormna would drop off and die any second and he didn’t want to be there to witness it. Jonathan stayed with Todd at track.

Still staring at the drawn map, Zormna weighed the amount of pressure she could put on her hurt leg and sighed, wondering what she ought to do next. Then she peered at the busy street. Zormna drew in a breath, then took her first step into the unknown since her kidnapping.

It was the scariest thing she had ever done.

She limped just a few paces then looked back and marked the FBI agents around her with her eyes. Three so far. Possibly more ahead. And she did not want them following. It was time to put her rusty training back into use.

First thing was first, let those following her think they had the upper hand. Then separate those following her so there were fewer of them. The first part was easy. She limped slowly across the street, then leaned on the fence to rest. Out in the open, in the broad daylight, there were still plenty of witnesses in case they tried to pick her off again. Yet that was not the plan. Going barely two blocks into the neighborhood, Zormna veered off the exposed street into a trashcan alley, slipping behind a tall fence. From there, she glanced once over her shoulder to make sure no one was there waiting for her.

Springing up with her left leg, she flipped lightly over the fence into a backyard. On her good leg, she landed in a bed of begonias, crouching down. Her feet still killed though. She set her eye to a crack in the wood and held her breath.

Not even three seconds after, a man in a plain suit walked by on the other side, talking into a concealed earpiece. “…I don’t know where she went. She pulled one of those vanishing acts again.” His voice had an argumentative bite to it. He scowled, his face painfully familiar. “I checked the alley. She’s not there.”

Even when Zormna could no longer hear him, she waited a few more minutes in case he or others came back. Then she carefully crept into another yard through the bushes. From there she snuck back into the alley, watching and listening to the air around her. Crossing into an unfamiliar road at the end of the backstreet, she glanced up at the nearest street sign she could find.

Her leg wound pulsated sharply. About three sharp pieces in the bottoms of her feet jabbed in deeper. But she did not stop.

Pulling out her folder from her book bag, Zormna examined the hand-drawn map. Kevin had written his address in bold letters so that she would not miss it, circling it twice.

Peering around one corner and then another, Zormna crossed the street with an indifferent air, though she limped as she did. She stuck to back roads that led towards Kevin’s neighborhood to keep out of sight most of the time.

His home stood on the other end of Pennington where the forest looped around. The walk was farther away than where Jennifer lived, which made her leg ache more. Occasionally she checked the street names to keep her on track. The last street sign said Madison Street. It was fancier than the signs that were around Jennifer’s neighborhood. Of course, Kevin would live in a richer part of town. It was so like him.

Trees thickly lined the street. Overhead, boughs swayed softly in the wind. Everything appeared new, from the houses to the sidewalks. The asphalt on the streets didn’t have that dusty bleached appearance like most of the wide thoroughfares in Pennington. These streets still had beautifully painted curbs with perfect street numbers and ornate mailboxes.

Zormna made her way down the quiet road, observing children riding their bicycles on the asphalt and playing, while she noticed kids from her high school driving around with their friends. She made sure they did not see her. After two blocks, she turned down an even quieter part of the neighborhood where the grass was thick and all the lawns were professionally groomed. Each piece of property was edged by shrubs trimmed to geometrical exactness. Flowers bloomed colorfully in beds and in hanging baskets on fences, draping to the left and right. The street sign to her left said Glen Knoll Road in fancy calligraphic letters.

A few people were out and about: an old man taking a walk, and a woman gardening in a huge pair of yellow polka dot shorts. Zormna could also see another sign, pristine and well-lettered in fine Roman font, planted on the corner, surrounded by azaleas. It said Quiet Zone. After that stood a wrought-iron fenced lot encompassing a huge sloping lawn with an enormous, forbidding building at the top of the hill. The forest grew at the back of the building. The building faced the neighborhood houses.

Only the wind and birds made noise on that street. No children played here. In fact, the residents of the homes seemed by majority to be senior citizens.  

As she stared at the building on the hill, Zormna took a step into the road. Drawn to it, limping to the enormous metal gate, which she noticed had only one opening, Zormna examined the entrance to see how a person would get inside. A strong sort of man in uniform guarded the gate, standing inside a brick shelter that was large enough to hold a room for an overnight stay.

He eyed her as she peered into the yard.

A shiver crawled down Zormna’s skin. She clutched her arms to her body.

Zormna limped farther along the fence, scrutinizing the building with an almost overpowering wave of nausea. Her eyes set on a man up at the building. He stood on a ladder that leaned over some perfectly-trimmed shrubbery against the brick surface. His work was at a window which she saw was broken. He was pulling out large chunks of glass with his thick gloves and dropping them into a bucket at the base of his ladder. Zormna saw a pane of glass to replace the broken window propped against the ladder down below.   

Automatically, Zormna rubbed her bandaged, and still stinging, hand where she had fresh, shallow cuts in her skin. In her mind’s eye, she could see her own hand sticking through a set of bars—chunks of glass falling. Blood had run down from it. Her throat felt sore and hoarse. She remembered shouting. She could almost feel herself pulling pieces of glass out if her hand. The pain, so vivid, transferred almost at once from the wound in her hand to her temples, as if glass had just been inserted there.

Wetting the inside of her mouth, Zormna shrank back toward the shady sidewalk. Images in her head came with pain. But now she knew they were true events she was remembering. Still, the pain hammered into her skull. She staggered farther back.

“Zormna,” Kevin hissed in a shrill whisper that really wasn’t a whisper, but a yell that sounded like he had a sore throat.

She turned around.

Kevin waved at her from across the street from a driveway to one of the houses. She limped over to him, glancing back at the enormous building and then at him while still walking forward.

“I know that place,” she barely uttered as Kevin led her to the front door.

“That place is an insane asylum,” Kevin explained under his breath, waving her in further, desperate to get her inside. “I told you to wait on the curb at school. Why didn’t you wait?”

“A what?” Zormna halted inside the entryway, which was something else—white tile, next to white pile carpet. All the lamps were frosted glass in pastels. The light switch even had elegance to it, curved and gilded.

“I knew you weren’t listening.” Kevin frowned as he closed his front door, most likely to shut out everything on the street to protect them both. “Look, it is an insane asylum. And last Sunday I heard you screaming from it.”

He led her through a pristine living room fit for a five star hotel or even a palace—all the way to a spotless white kitchen with matching stainless steel labor-saving devices from the coffee pot to the refrigerator. Zormna stared back the way they had come, though, still thinking about what he had said.

Kevin dragged out a stool at the edge of the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room, gesturing to it.

“Thanks,” she muttered in a daze, sitting right down. Her headache had not gone, and she was feeling intensely fatigued. Her feet throbbed.

“You’re welcome.” Kevin went immediately to the refrigerator and opened it. He glanced back at Zormna once as he let out a thoughtful sigh. “Say, you want something to drink?”

Zormna’s thoughts pulled out of the daze. She blinked at him then glanced around herself. “Not really.”

Her eyes flickered to the room she had just passed through. His house really was too much like a museum, unlike the McLenna home which was more of a collection of mismatched things used to simply have a life. The carpet here coordinated with the curtains, which draped in esthetic arches and were tied, then hooked on wrought iron, all artistically embellished with tassels and fringe. The lamps mimicked that also. Perfectly matched upholstery print, edged with velvet and corded trim, offsetting the light cream print with a dark burgundy shade. All the couches, all the rugs, and the useless knickknacks of carved spheres and overlarge burnished keys, went well with the ethnic paintings on the walls that, Zormna suspected, reflected the color scheme rather than the interests of the household. In a way, it explained Kevin’s preoccupation with grooming, which Zormna had always thought obsessive and vain. His cologne alone was overpowering.

And looking at it, it seemed odd that Kevin was interested in a girl like Jennifer. Then again, Kevin didn’t exactly look comfortable in his own home. He foraged through the fridge, shoving aside labeled, sealed, BPA-free snap-lock containers full of oddly named foods like hummus, quinoa, chia seeds, and rutabaga to get to a jug labeled Organic Milk.

But she really only had one thing on her mind. Leaning on the counter as she watched him go next to a cupboard for some cups, Zormna said, “Kevin, you said you saw me getting carried into that building, as if they were recovering an escaped patient. Do you know how I got there? Who it was that had me?”

“Oh, so you were listening.” He brought over two full glasses of milk and a box of Oreos, setting one glass in front of her. He left the cookie package open. “No, I don’t know how you got there or who they were. But whoever took you really wanted to keep you there—at least for a while. You looked completely thrashed.”

He bit into his cookie. Black crumbs fell down his chin.

“Thrashed? What exactly do you