Suzie Coltrane Saves the Day

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

The girls survived their train ride with no surprises. They even took the opportunity to sleep for a couple of hours. They were both so exhausted from the events of the night that no matter how hard they tried; neither of them could keep their eyes open long enough to stand guard for the other.

​Somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, Suzie woke up to the new day with the sun streaming in her eyes. It had been nice to finally get some sleep. She felt as if she had been on the run for days and awake for even longer. Her nerves were shot. She was living on the edge and ready to erupt. She had to try and force herself to calm down. She was going to have to be rational or else they would be lost in New York with no clue what their next step was going to be.

​"Wait a minute." Suzie thought, realizing that she had forgotten that she had an aunt who lived in New York. Since her mom never talked about her younger sister, Suzie had always gotten the impression that they didn't like each other. But she was still family, and Suzie knew that she would help them out since this was kind of an emergency.

​"Hey, Gwen!" She whispered, waking Gwen out of a dream-like trance as she stared at the seat in front of her.
​"Yeah?"
​"My aunt Christy lives in Manhattan, I'm sure she will help us out."
​"Well, that's stupid, why didn't you think of her before?"

​"She and my mom don't get along. But, she'll take care of us. She's just got to, right?"
​"Do you know where she lives?"
​"Yeah, Manhattan."
​"Oh yeah? She shouldn't be hard to find then, huh? Only a couple million people are living there. We'll just knock on a door or two. We should find her pretty quickly."

​"Alright, fine, smart aleck, I get your point. What I meant was we can look her up in the phone book when we get there."
​"Oh, I guess we can do that. Okay, now let me sleep some more."

​They arrived safely at Grand Central Station about ten o'clock that morning. Luckily, as they stepped off the train, they didn't see any strange-looking men. Well, at least they didn't see any men who might be looking for them.

They saw plenty of strange-looking people all around them. People were sleeping on the benches or leaning against the wall looking for food or handouts or just a warm place to rest for a few hours. The girls walked through the station as fast as they could without drawing undue attention to themselves.

As they walked out the main doors, Suzie felt a sense of relief as she scanned the cars parked in front of the terminal. There was not a single black car near the station. They had made their escape successfully.
​The next step for the girls was to find a nearby phone booth. That seemed easy enough considering there were at least five within the couple blocks they could see. But after walking around and checking most of them, it became clear that their real mission was not to find a phone booth but to find one that had a phone book. This was not nearly as easy. After wandering around for almost thirty minutes, they finally found one that still had a phone book.

​"Finally! Let's look up your aunt and get to her place, I'm exhausted."
​"Okay, okay. Let's see, Christy...er, Christie...um."
​"Oh come on, please tell me you know her last name."
​"I know it, I know it. I just can't think of it right now. It's umm..."

​Suzie thought for a second, trying to remember any last name she could think of to help her out.

​"It's not Johnson or Smith or Johanson or Adams..."
​She kept calling out names, but that wasn't helping her out at all.
​"I know, she had a famous last name. Let's see, an actor? No, actress? Um...oh yeah, duh! It's that president guy's last name. That's how I always remembered it."