The Alcatraz Escape Read online

  A distant but furious roar made Emily go completely numb, and then her heart started pounding rapidly.

  What in the world was that? Was that a person? Could that be an animal? She had no clue what might be kept in the dungeons of Alcatraz, but she was suddenly remembering the Greek myth about the Minotaur who lived in a labyrinth.

  Emily didn’t know what to do. Before she could make a decision and act, light bounced on the wall up ahead, and then rounded the corner, beaming from the top of Lucy Leonard’s head. A bloodcurdling scream ricocheted around the cavernous room.

  Emily squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t sure if she or Lucy was screaming. Perhaps it was both of them.

  “What are you doing here?!” Lucy Leonard finally yelled. “What is on your head?”

  Emily’s hands flew up to her face. Her heart was doing a frantic dance in her chest. “What is on your head?” she shot back.

  “It’s a headlamp,” Lucy replied, her voice less shouty.

  “I’m wearing night-vision goggles.” Emily’s words came out quickly. She took a deep breath. “They don’t work so well in here,” she added.

  “Why in the world are you down here?” Lucy asked her. “You should be out there playing the game.”

  “So should you!” Emily argued back. “And you shouldn’t be framing my brother.”

  “Framing your … what?”

  “My brother! You stuck that bracelet in his pocket.”

  “I … what?” Lucy Leonard let out a long sigh. “Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Emily was thankful for the pressure of her goggles against her eyes, because her nose stung and tears were threatening to fall. Everything was getting to her—the darkness and the musky smell of being underground, her brother being called a thief, Fiona trapping her in A-Block.

  Emily pressed her back against the wall and slid to a sitting position on the floor. The bricks were so cold, it felt like ice chilling her jeans. Tears slid from her eyes and she pushed the night-vision goggles onto her forehead so she could rub them away.

  “Hey,” Lucy said. She crouched next to her. “Hey, it’s okay. I don’t understand what’s going on with your brother, but I’m sure things will work out. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m giving up on my mission anyway, so I’ll head back with you, and maybe I can help you sort things out.”

  “We can’t,” Emily moaned. “We’re trapped.”

  Lucy tugged on her arm. “Now you’re being dramatic. We’re not trapped.”

  “Yes, we are,” Emily said. “Fiona closed the gate to A-Block behind me, and it’s locked.”

  “It’s … what?!” Lucy’s headlamp whizzed to the right and left, like she was frantically trying to get her bearings. “Are you serious? Why didn’t you lead with that?”

  Lucy hurried out of the dungeon the way they’d come in, with Emily following behind. The woman ran to the closed gate and tested it for herself. They both rattled the cage door as loudly as they could, but again nobody came.

  Lucy pulled a cell phone from her knapsack, pressing a button so the screen lit up. “No service, of course.” She sighed. “Okay, let’s think. Let’s think.” She started pacing and tapping her phone into the palm of her hand. “If we can’t get out this way, we can go back into the dungeon and use the tunnels. If we can find our way to the morgue, there might be an entry point into it from the tunnel.”

  “The morgue? Like where they keep the dead people?” Emily shivered.

  “Mm-hmm.” Lucy nodded absentmindedly, mulling over her proposed plan. She explained, “The morgue was built on top of an entrance to an old military tunnel from the 1870s.”

  Finally Lucy registered Emily’s alarm. “It hasn’t been used in decades,” she reassured her. “And even when the prison was active, it was barely used. They never performed autopsies on Alcatraz and most bodies were sent to the mainland.” Lucy said all of that as if it would be reassuring.

  It wasn’t.

  Lucy turned her back on the jail cells in A-Block and sliced her hand like she was cutting cake. “If this is east, and if this is south”—she rotated a quarter of a circle—“then the morgue would be…” She bobbed her head around, and Emily imagined she was visualizing a map. “Okay, I think I’ve got it.”

  Lucy led them back down the steep, shallow staircase into the dungeon. Her headlamp bounced off the brick walls, and Emily hurried to stay close. Her night-vision goggles were still up on her forehead, and she fidgeted with their strap as if it were a headband.

  “What was your mission?” Emily asked as they walked.

  “My what?”

  “You said before you were down here on a mission,” Emily reminded her.

  Lucy shook her head, making the headlamp swoop across the dark expanse in front of them.

  “My mission is I’m an idiot.”

  They turned a corner, then another, and Lucy slowed down, the light on her head illuminating every direction she looked. She stopped in front of an opening that looked more like a jagged hole punched through the brick than an official entry point. Vertical metal beams on either side appeared to hold up the tunnel roof.

  “That’s where we need to go.”

  “In there? Are we allowed?” Emily asked.

  “Uh, kid, none of this is allowed.” Lucy swung her arms wide. “You shouldn’t have followed me back to A-Block, and neither of us should be down here. As long as we don’t move anything or dig or upset any of these metal support beams they’ve put in, we should be fine.”

  Should be rang in Emily’s ears.

  “How do you know all this? Where to go down here?” Emily asked. It occurred to her that maybe it was crazy for her to trust this adult she barely knew to lead her through the belly of Alcatraz.

  “I’ve been studying the tunnels for a book I’m writing,” Lucy said. “I’m fairly certain the opening to the morgue is right through there.”

  Well, Emily didn’t feel like she had many options. And the sooner they got into this morgue, the sooner they would get out and back to her friends and brother. Emily straightened her shoulders and steeled her resolve. Lucy climbed through first; then Emily took a deep breath and swung one leg over the bottom wall of the hole and climbed in after. She could reach her hands out on either side and feel cool brick walls. This area had much lower ceilings. They only had to go a few feet before Lucy stopped and looked up, her headlamp illuminating a recessed opening above them that was about as big as a medium-sized dog. Lucy reached through the opening and knocked on what sounded like wood.

  “There it is. That’s the hatch into the morgue.”

  CHAPTER

  31

  LUCY PUSHED AGAINST the door, testing it out. “This tunnel we’re in used to not be accessible at all, but they’ve been working on restoring them. I don’t think this is a very permanent door, so I was hoping…” She pushed against it again, straining.

  Emily stood on her tiptoes and pushed with her. They knocked and pounded and pressed until finally the wood gave way and fell with a clatter on the other side of the opening.

  Emily and Lucy stared up into the black chasm.

  “I’ll give you a boost, and you climb through first,” Lucy said. “I’ll follow right behind.”

  “You want me to go first? Into a morgue?!”

  “I don’t think we have a choice. I can climb through first, but then how would you get up?”

  Lucy had a point.

  Emily closed her eyes, planning to visualize being in her bedroom instead of inside a morgue at night on Alcatraz.

  “Okay,” Emily said, her eyes still shut.

  But then she heard James’s voice, far-off but distinct, call out, “See, there’s the water tower!”

  Emily’s eyes popped open. “My friends!” she said.

  “Those voices?” Lucy asked.

  “Yes, that was James.”

  “Do you think they’re looking for you?”

  “It sounds like they’
re looking for a … water tower? I thought the game was over.”

  “Hello!” Lucy hollered. Emily joined in, too. They tossed their heads back and yelled at the top of their lungs, which felt oddly freeing. For a second Emily could forget she was trapped underground on Alcatraz.

  Their shouts faded, and they listened, but Emily couldn’t hear her friends anymore.

  “If they’re hunting for a clue near the water tower,” Lucy said, “then they’ll likely be coming back this way. If we can get ourselves up there, we’ll have a better chance at catching their attention.”

  This time Emily didn’t hesitate when Lucy laced her fingers together and offered her hands as a step for Emily’s foot.

  The next thing she knew, she was launched into the dark void. Her forearms folded over the cold, hard lip of the hole; then she pulled herself forward, her backpack scraping the edge of the opening, and crawled out the hole onto the floor.

  She was in the very back of the morgue and could see now that the hatch was like a hobbit-sized door in the floor. Crouching in the dark, Emily completely forgot her plan to keep her eyes closed.

  The morgue was a small space, maybe the size of a couple of jail cells, and mostly empty other than an old bench and an ancient piece of industrial equipment Emily was currently wedged next to. The back part of the morgue, where she and the bulbous machine were, was in an alcove, and when she straightened, she had to be mindful of both the low ceiling and the pipes that ran from the contraption. When she stepped out of the alcove into the small main area, the ceiling was much higher and made of windows, like a greenhouse roof, but the glass was opaque from age and dirt and the shadows of overgrown vines.

  Once Lucy was out of the tunnel and in the morgue next to her, they stepped to the front of the space and tried to twist the handle of the main door, but it was locked from the outside. The windows that weren’t overgrown with ivy had been rusted shut.

  “Are we trapped in here?” Emily asked. She attempted to swallow the panic rising up her throat. When she was stuck in A-Block, at least Fiona knew she was there, but nobody would think to check the morgue.

  “I wouldn’t say trapped. We can also go back through the dungeon to where we started.”

  Emily didn’t know which place would be worse to wait in, and the thought of climbing back into the dark and clammy tunnels under Alcatraz made her shiver.

  “Remember, your friends passed by,” Lucy reminded her. “Let’s stay put and see if we can get their attention on their way back.”

  “Okay.” Emily nodded curtly, her ponytail bobbing against her neck.

  Lucy checked her phone again. “Yes! I’ve got bars. Of course my battery’s nearly dead.”

  “Can you text my brother?” Emily asked. “He has his phone with him.”

  Lucy handed over the phone, and Emily typed in her messages:

  This is Emily.

  I’m trapped in the morgue.

  And I’m sorry I didn’t have your back.

  “Now I guess we wait,” Lucy said. She pulled off her headlamp and roughed up her hair where the straps had been.

  They perched on the edge of a bench that had moss growing over it. The morgue smelled like salt water and fog, and sitting there in the darkness, Emily was reminded of Nisha’s fears of an Alcatraz ghost. Chills spread down her back as she imagined one in the alcove behind them, watching them. Emily wanted to think about anything else, so she asked Lucy, “Why did you say your mission was being an idiot?”

  “Oh.” Lucy snorted sheepishly. “It would bore you. It had to do with my next book.”

  “The one about Harriet Beecher Stowe?”

  Lucy Leonard cocked her head to the side. “Good memory,” she said. “It might surprise you to know I’m not here to play Mr. Griswold’s game.”

  “Noooo,” Emily said in mock outrage.

  Lucy guffawed. “You guessed, huh? Well, my most recent book, The Twain Conspiracy, was pretty successful.”

  That seemed like an understatement, Emily thought, but she mm-hmmed to show she was listening.

  “I’m under a lot of pressure to follow it up with something similar, specifically a true story about a historical figure of significance that reveals something previously unknown. And I’m an idiot because I came here on a fool’s errand. I thought I’d be able to solve a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mystery.”

  Lucy nudged Emily with her elbow. “I suppose I’m talking to the wrong person for sympathy since you actually did solve a mystery that old.”

  Emily ducked her head and smiled. “What’s the unsolved mystery you wanted to solve?” she asked.

  “What happened to Frederick Stowe,” Lucy replied.

  “Frederick Stowe?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son disappeared in 1871 after arriving in San Francisco. He wrote his mother about plans to go out to sea and work on a ship, and that was the last she or anyone ever heard from him. There have been different theories about what might have happened. San Francisco was a rough town back then and there was a practice called shanghaiing, where people were kidnapped and made to work as indentured servants on ships. That’s one possibility. Frederick struggled with alcohol addiction, so others propose he succumbed once again to addiction and didn’t make a recovery. Others speculate that he purposely cut off his connection with his family because he suffered under the limelight of his mother’s fame.”

  “Her books were popular?” Emily asked.

  “Oh, her writing went beyond popular,” Lucy replied. “It’s been said that Abraham Lincoln once greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with the words, ‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,’ referring to the Civil War. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was popular and it spurred contentious political debate and fueled the fires of the Civil War.”

  Emily swung her legs on the bench as she considered this. “So what do you think happened to him?”

  “I think he came to Alcatraz.”

  “Here?!” Emily said.

  Lucy nodded. “In 1871, when Frederick Stowe arrived in San Francisco, this was Fort Alcatraz—the island was owned by the military. There was a citadel that was torn down in the 1900s, but the dungeon we were in, those rooms were part of it.”

  “Why do you think he came here?”

  “That”—Lucy held up a finger—“is where my great discovery comes in. I found a letter.”

  “A letter?”

  “Yes. A letter signed by a Frederick that was mixed in with Mark Twain’s papers, of all places. I found it when I was researching The Twain Conspiracy. He and Harriet Beecher Stowe were neighbors for a period of time, toward the end of her life. My theory is the letter was misdelivered and Harriet never received it.”

  “That’s so sad,” Emily said. Being apart from her parents right that very moment, she imagined if she and Lucy remained trapped on Alcatraz and were never found, and her parents never learned what happened to her. Sitting in the tiny morgue illuminated only by diluted moonlight, the idea of never seeing her parents again was kind of freaking her out. The walls felt like they were pushing the darkness even closer to her, and the night felt eerily quiet except for a distant and steady shhhh of the bay waves.

  “Did the letter say he was here?” Emily asked in a hushed voice.

  “No, but it did say he had re-enlisted in the army. I found that interesting, but I didn’t immediately make a connection to Alcatraz. But then, not too long after I found the letter, I heard about an Alcatraz urban legend. Supposedly there is writing in the citadel and underground tunnels that dates back to the 1800s. Signatures of some of the men who were here, that sort of thing. But what rang some bells for me is that there is rumored to be a longer quote written on the walls down there that says something about not giving up, and soon the tide will turn.

  “That resonated because there is a fairly well-known Harriet Beecher Stowe quote from a book she wrote a couple of years before Frederick disappeared called
Oldtown Folks. It goes like this: ‘When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you couldn’t hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that’s just the place and time that the tide’ll turn.’”

  “But, I thought you said you didn’t solve the mystery?” Emily said. “It sounds to me like you did.”

  “What I have is a theory. I don’t have any proof other than the letter. And, even if I can get that verified as being from Frederick, it will only prove that he survived, but doesn’t really explain what happened to him. Even if I located the quote, I’m not sure that would solve the mystery conclusively, either, although it would certainly strengthen my case.” Lucy sighed. “It was a harebrained idea, anyway.”

  A distant foghorn gave a mournful moan, as if it was as discouraged as Lucy about her Stowe book.

  “You don’t have to give up on the book, though,” Emily said. “Why don’t you come back to Alcatraz another day? Ask one of the park rangers to show you around the dungeon.”

  “That’s just it—I did ask, but they won’t grant access to the tunnels right now because of all the reconstruction projects they’re doing. And I don’t have time to wait because of my deadlines. When I heard about Mr. Griswold’s game, I was enticed by the idea of coming to the island when there wouldn’t be as many people, and I might possibly find my way into the tunnels.…”

  Lucy waved her hands like good riddance. “It was a ridiculous idea born out of desperation. You’re probably too young to understand any of this, but once you achieve a moment of success, there can be a lot of pressure to live up to expectations and regurgitate that success over and over. It’s almost like a paranoia—you feel like all eyes are on you, even though the rational part of your brain knows all eyes aren’t, and people probably don’t care as much as you think. But then that can mess with you, too—the idea that people don’t care at all.”

  That actually made complete sense to Emily.

  “You think more about what other people are thinking and doing,” Emily said slowly, “and then you act differently because of that, instead of doing something the way you normally would.”