With a quick glance back over her shoulder, Sarah ducked down a stairwell that led to the locker rooms. A second glance let her know she was alone. She paused, listening for steps behind her, but heard none. There was a distant echo of teenage voices laughing, but they seemed benign and un-Wolf-like. Red Three had told her that down the corridor she would see a door marked ladies. That was where she was headed. She pushed inside.
Sarah sighed when she realized she was alone. She thought, The Wolf won’t follow me in here. Again, she knew this was nonsense. A killer bent on murder wouldn’t really feel a sense of propriety about entering a women’s bathroom. Still, she felt oddly reassured.
There were three stalls to her right, across from some glistening sinks. She went into the farthest. Sarah locked the door behind her and sat down on the toilet to wait. Fifteen minutes, Red Three had told her. She checked her wristwatch. Time seemed to pass erratically, as if each minute had some different, odd number of seconds that bore no relation to the regular sixty.
Karen was hunched down in her car, waiting for the first flow of people to emerge through the gymnasium doors. Other than pinning her hair back and throwing on running shoes, she hadn’t taken any steps to disguise herself.
Instead, she had arrived in the parking lot outside the gym and stepped out of her car and walked up and down each row of vehicles, staring in at each, making certain they were all empty. This had seemed to her to be just on the near side of crazy behavior, but she felt reassured when she slipped back into her own car.
She had rolled down her window so that she could keep track of the game’s progress by listening for the muted cheers from the crowd. She had heard the buzzer signaling the end and known she would have to wait for only a few moments.
The first people through the doors were students. They were laughing as they disappeared into the slippery evening darkness. Then a steadier flow of teenagers, adults, and even some small children began to emerge.
That was her signal to move.
Like a fish swimming against the current, she ducked her head and zigzagged through the exiting crowd. She was the only person battling to get in. That had been her only plan. If the Wolf was behind her, he would create the same commotion she did. She kept looking back over her shoulder to see if there was someone trying to follow her through the knots of people. It did not seem so.
Karen headed toward the same stairwell that Sarah had passed down moments earlier. A few students were walking either up or down, but no Wolf. She found the ladies’ room as easily as Sarah. Unconsciously mimicking Red Two’s movements, she looked right and left, making sure she was alone. Then she, too, ducked inside.
She let a second of two of silence fill the room before she stage-whispered, “Sarah?”
“I’m right here,” came the reply from the stall. Sarah emerged from behind the door and the two women awkwardly embraced.
Karen stepped back and looked at the fake pregnancy outfit and the short black wig and managed a small smile before speaking. “You must have been…” Karen started, thinking about the paw prints on the headstones. She stopped, not knowing what word to use. Scared? Terrified? Upset?
“Totally freaked,” Sarah replied, grimly, even if her choice of words seemed easygoing. “When I called you, I was panicked. But I’ve gotten hold of myself. Sort of. Still a little shaky. How about you?”
Karen thought about describing being on stage and hearing the wolf whistle and thinking it was the Wolf’s whistle, but didn’t. She believed that stirring up Sarah’s already unsteady emotions couldn’t possibly help. Be the strong one, she insisted to herself. This admonition was part medical training and part the inability to see what else she could be.
“Have you been keeping time?” she asked.
Sarah nodded. “Maybe fifteen, right about now.”
“All right. Let’s go.”
The two women exited the toilet into the corridor. They were alone, but they could both hear loud teenage voices echoing from not too far away.
“Down and to the right,” Sarah said. “That’s what Jordan said.”
They waited another moment, both of them pivoting right and left. Karen thought it odd, the way they had developed of making sure they weren’t being followed. The idea that they were alone in the well-lit cinder-block hallway wasn’t reassuring. But neither did they want to see the Wolf, because each knew what that would mean: The end.
The girls’ locker room was just where Jordan had told them it would be. There were two teenage girls standing outside, jawing with a pair of boys. The girls’ hair was damp and their faces flushed, and Sarah recognized them from the game. They stood aside when the two women pushed past them and went into the locker room.
Heat and steam immediately surrounded them. The noise of running water splashed from a shower room. Laughter bounced off the white tile walls loudly.
“Nothing like winning,” Sarah said. “Makes other problems disappear.”
“Not really,” Jordan said, startling the two women. “Or actually, it doesn’t make our problem disappear,” she quickly added, emphasizing the one word with a lowered voice and a shake of her head.
She was only partially dressed, in a skimpy white T-shirt and black bikini underwear. She had a hairbrush in her hand and like the other girls on the team her hair was damp from the shower. Both older women felt a twinge of envy at the easy fitness of the teenager’s figure: muscles, flat stomach, narrow hips, and long legs that glistened with a few stray drops of water. Jordan was right at that age where skinny was easy and sensuality seemed to redden her skin like a brisk rub with a towel.
She smiled at Sarah. “I like your costume. Pregnant, right?”
Sarah nodded, then pulled up her sweater to show the pillow taped to her midsection.
“Cool. Probably work on a subway. Help you get a seat,” Jordan said.
She slid past Sarah and Karen to her locker and tugged on a pair of faded jeans and a hooded blue sweatshirt from Middlebury College. She smiled and pointed at the school’s name. “Prestige school,” she said. “Before this past year, I would have gotten in for sure. Now, no way.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Karen said with a maternal smile.
“I’m not,” Jordan replied. “But I’m a realist.”
Karen thought: No teenager is really a realist. But she did not say this out loud.
The three women sat on a wooden bench as Jordan slipped on running socks and shoes. She carefully double-knotted the laces, and without looking up at the other two Reds she asked, “What are we supposed to do now?”
Sarah was the first to respond. She pointed at the wig and pillow. “Hide?” she said, using the word as both a statement and a question.
“You mean run away,” Jordan replied.
“Yes. Exactly.”
Each woman was quiet for a moment, as if measuring the suggestion. Jordan broke the silence.
“If I just go home-and given the way things are at my house, that’s not really possible-what makes you think that the Wolf hasn’t anticipated that? I mean, we only know he’s been watching us for some time. Perhaps he’s followed me around my hometown, and that’s what he’s expecting me to do because it makes sense. Scare a kid…”-Jordan gestured to herself-“… and the kid runs home to mom and pop. Only I can’t do that, because my mom and pop are a mess.”
Karen shook her head, but answered in a contradictory way. “Maybe we could just each find some friend, visit them…”
“And how would we know for how long?” Jordan asked. “I mean, the Wolf doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. He probably has a schedule, but we don’t have a clue what it is. And eventually, we’re going to show up back here-I mean, this is where I go to school and you both live here-and bingo! It starts up all over again. Maybe he’s figured on that. Or maybe he wants us to run because the more we isolate ourselves the easier it is for him. Or maybe…” Jordan stopped.