Use your brain, young man. Use your brain and find a way out RIGHT NOW.

That’s why he was walking the edge of the room, looking for a way to escape. Because she’d want him to, because she’d insist he not give up. More than anything, Mom hates quitters. Quitters and complainers. Tomas learned that early, and it was confirmed when his father died. Mom never complained about Dad dying, she just got to work and tried to make things better. Worked so hard all day, cooking and baking and on the phone, that sometimes she’d fall asleep at the dinner table, waiting for him to finish. When that happened he’d get his own special blanket from the bedroom and cover her. The blanket that kept him safe would keep her safe, too. That’s what he’d believed at the time, because he was too little to know any better. Part of him still believed it. Part of him wanted his blanket right now. Wanted to curl up and be four years old and not have to worry about the real stinky cheese man, the one who was sick in the head and sometimes called him “son,” as if he was confused, as if he didn’t quite know who Tomas really was.

Has to be a way out, if only he can find it. He’s discovered that the walls are made of heavy plywood—he can feel the grain of it under the white paint—and the floor is concrete. Probably the ceiling is plywood, too, but he can’t tell for sure because he can’t reach that high. The dresser is gone and even if he stands on top of the stupid potty-chair he can’t touch the ceiling, can’t touch the bare bulb that lights the room. The door is made of metal and, if anything, it feels more solid than the heavy plywood walls. Even if he finds a way to get through the door, he knows there’s another door beyond it, equally heavy and impenetrable.

Has to be the walls. Once a couple years ago a squirrel got trapped in the attic because Tomas must have left a window open. Then Mom closed the window and that night the squirrel chewed right through the attic roof and escaped. Tomas had been amazed by the tooth marks, and by the frantic will of the squirrel, grinding through solid wood to get out. Like he’d read where wolves and coyotes sometimes chewed off their own feet to get out of a trap. Or that guy out in the wilderness who hacked off his leg to get out from under a boulder, and then crawled ten miles to the nearest town.

Tomas isn’t ready to cut off his own limbs, but he feels like that mad squirrel, ready to chew through solid wood. Only, his teeth aren’t sharp enough. If he had a jackknife he could whittle a hole and then make it bigger, but the only knife he owns is in his top drawer at home, along with his albums of baseball cards and the ball recovered after his first home run. He had three home runs so far, but had decided to keep only the first ball, because keeping all of them was like bragging about it, and Major Leaguers like A-Rod never bragged.

Unable to find a workable seam on the wall—nothing his fingernails can get at—he veers for the pile of food and water left by Stinky Steve. Enough granola bars and breakfast cereal for more than a dozen meals, along with a half gallon of milk, a case of bottled water and a plastic Tupperware bowl for the cereal. There’s no way to keep the milk cool and it’s already going sour, so Tomas had tried eating Frosted Flakes with water instead of milk. That was disgusting, so he eats the cereal right out of the box, like Mom won’t let him do at home.

A dozen meals was enough for at least four days, if he doesn’t pig out. Does that mean Stinky Steve won’t be back for four days? Maybe, maybe not. But Tomas figures this may be his only chance to escape, if he can only find a way.

Munching on a handful of Frosted Flakes, he returns to the room perimeter, looking for something, anything. And that’s when he sees it, stuck where the plywood meets the concrete floor.

A dime.

Tomas gets down on his knees, puts his clotted-up nose to the floor and eyeballs the dime. Pries at it with his nubby fingers and almost dies when the dime starts to disappear under the bottom edge of the plywood, like a bug slinking out of sight.

Fighting tears, he stops what he’s doing and thinks about it. Has to be a way to get the dime out. Can’t push it. Needs something flat, like a knife blade, to pry it from the side. But if he had a knife he wouldn’t need the dime, would he? Stupid. Use your brain, dirtball. Think of a way to pry it out from under the plywood.

What he does, he empties the sour milk into the potty-chair—truly disgusting—and tears the plastic jug with his teeth. Harder than he thought it would be, tearing the milk jug, but he finally gets it started and then the whole thing rips apart in his hands and he has a strip of flimsy plastic thin enough to fit under the bottom edge of the plywood.

A minute later, triumphant, he has a dime in his hands. Remaining on his knees, he uses the edge of the dime to scrape along the butted seams of the plywood wall. Finding the dimple of filler that hides a screw head.

He scrapes away the filler, exposing the screw head. Uses his fingernails to clean out the slots. Sets the edge of the dime into the slot and tries to turn the screw.

The dimes slips, falls from his hands. Rolls around. He tracks it with the same sharp eyes that can focus on a moving ground ball, and when the dime lies still he picks it up and tries again. Putting more weight into it this time, gripping the coin with all his might. The screw moves a quarter turn and stops and the dime jumps out of his hands again.

Takes forever to find the dime where it rolled up against the foam mattress. This time, before setting the dime into the slot, he studies the screw and realizes he’s been turning it the wrong way, tightening the screw rather than loosening it.

Left to right tightens, right to left loosens. Good to know.

Fearful that the slots on the screw head are getting worn, he scrapes away the dimple of filler from another screw and tries that, remembering to turn the other way.

Three minutes later, his whole body shaking with excitement, he has removed the first screw from the wall.

33 good night, irene

Jackals with blue eyes. That’s what Maria Savalo calls our friends in the media. Mostly local TV-news folks, with satellite trucks and boom antennas and big hair, but I recognize at least one print reporter from the Fairfax Weekly. Frankly, the poor woman looks a little frightened by the violent enthusiasm of her TV colleagues, who appear ready to stampede at a sudden noise or, as it happens, the sight of me emerging from the police station in handcuffs.

“KATE!” they roar. “KAAAAAATE!”

As if they know me. As if we’re old friends. Lunging with microphones on poles. One of the padded microphones clobbers Deputy Sheriff Crebbins in the side of the head, and I’m not so secretly pleased to see him wince with surprise, if not pain. Back in the station the smug little man sounded so certain of my guilt. That self-satisfied glint in his eye as they took fingerprints, snapped mug shots. As if he, too, knows me intimately, has so deeply communed with my soul that he can discern the impulse to kill.

Mug shots. It won’t take long for the tabloids to obtain copies of the very unflattering photographs of Mrs. Katherine Ann Bickford looking stunned as she is compelled to hold up a slate with her name and arrest numbers. Crebbin will probably be handing them out as party favors.

I never thought about how unfair mug shots are, how they make anyone look like a criminal. Put name and numbers under a harshly lit head shot and Mother Teresa herself would look like a felon. And I, obviously, am no Mother Teresa. I’m the killer mom who hid a body in the freezer with the frozen cookie dough and the lobster-stuffed ravioli, the she-devil who kidnapped her own son, the monster with the minivan.