Chapter 4 - The Slate Roof
The plywood over the left dormer window was old, its lower corners soft from twenty years of rain leaks.
Emma didn't wait for Lily. She drove the iron crowbar into the gap between the window frame and the bottom edge of the wood, putting her whole body into a frantic levering motion. The dry pine splintered with a sound like a gun shot, the bottom three nails tearing free from the rotten frame.
"Push!" Emma yelled.
They shoved the bottom of the plywood outward. It swung up like a hatch, revealing a small three-foot window frame with two broken panes of wavy glass.
Beyond it lay the sharp incline of the Victorian slate roof, dripping with morning dew and leading thirty feet down to the porch gutter.
"Out!" Lily shoved Emma through the small opening first.
Emma squeezed her shoulders through, her boots finding traction on the slick, dark blue slates outside. Cold wind hit her face, smelling of pine trees and distant asphalt.
A bullet slammed into the plaster three inches from Lily’s ear, filling the small dormer nook with a blinding flash and white dust.
Lily scrambled through the window, her backpack catching for a terrible second on a jagged piece of glass before she ripped it free and tumbled out onto the roof beside her sister.
Behind them, Arthur’s bloody face appeared at the gap in the plywood.
"Come back here!" he screamed, his voice cracking against the wind. "You have no idea what you're doing!"
He raised the silver gun through the opening.
"Down!" Emma pulled Lily flat against the cold slate.
They slid ten feet down the wet roof on their stomachs, their fingernails scraping against the rough stone edges until they reached the lip of the heavy copper gutter that ran along the roofline.
Below them, sixty feet down, lay the jagged slate flags of the side patio.
To their left, the heavy wrought-iron fire escape—installed during World War II when the house was briefly used as a Red Cross outpost—hung three feet from the roof edge, its rusty ladder leading down to the second-floor balcony.
"Jump for the rail!" Lily shouted over the wind.
"It's three feet!" Emma yelled back, looking down at the drop. "If we miss—"
"We're not missing!"
Lily didn't give herself time to think. She pushed off from the copper gutter with both feet, sailing through the cold air, her hands outstretched.
Her fingers caught the top iron rail of the fire escape. The rust bit into her palms, stripping away skin as her momentum swung her legs out over empty space. She kicked wildly, her right boot finding the bottom rung of the landing.
She turned back instantly. "Emma! Jump!"
Behind Emma, on the roof above, Arthur was pulling himself through the dormer window, his gun held high.
Emma leaped.
She hit the iron platform hard, her knees slamming into the metal mesh floor. Lily grabbed her coat collar, dragging her back against the brick wall of the house just as another bullet struck the iron railing with a loud ping, spraying them with silver metal flakes.
"Down the ladder!" Emma choked out, pushing herself up.
They tumbled down the narrow spiral steps of the fire escape, three rungs at a time, their feet making a thunderous metallic noise that echoed across the quiet hill.
They hit the second-floor balcony, kicked through a rotten French door into an old master bedroom, and ran down the grand mahogany staircase into the foyer.
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The heavy front doors of Hillrest Manor were unlocked from the inside.
They shoved the iron handles, burst through into the blinding autumn sunlight, and didn't stop running until they reached the iron gates at the bottom of the hill.
