Forget to Remember

get to pick the setup. I’m just going to deal out all the cards and see where they fall. Then I’ll start.”
    He ended up dealing six rows, seemingly at random: 16-13-10-7-5-1. Carol had practiced converting to binary and adding up the columns. As she calculated in her head, Beard said he wanted to risk all of the ten grand. Carol cringed. If Ault knew what he was doing, Beard would end up with nothing.
    Ault studied the board for only a few seconds and removed the single card, leaving 16-13-10-7-5. That was the wrong move. He had to take cards from the row of sixteen, because in binary, sixteen is 10000, and the other rows contained fewer than sixteen cards. Thus the binary 1 was in a column by itself, violating the rule that each column should have an even number of ones for a winning combination.
    Beard was right about Ault. He had undoubtedly once had a razor-sharp mind, but he’d lost it. He had become senile. Carol knew the move she should make, but she couldn’t do it. She sat and stared at the cards. Beard stared at her. He was getting fidgety. Ault was humming a tune to himself.
    Carol stood up from the table. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
    Beard started to protest, but Ault held up his hand. “When you gotta go you gotta go. The cards will still be here when you return.”
    Carol took her purse and followed the route she had memorized to the bathroom. A house this size resembled a maze, and finding the bathroom wasn’t a cinch. She went inside and closed and locked the door. She looked at the window she remembered seeing beside the toilet. It was cracked open. She raised the sash until there was enough room for her to fit through.
    A screen covered the opening. She fiddled with it for a few seconds and figured out how to loosen it. It was light; she held it in both hands and gave it a push to sail it away from the window. She stood on the toilet and stuck her head out into the darkness. She could just make out grass a few feet below. The screen had fallen far enough away so she wouldn’t land on it.
    She hesitated. Once she went through the window, she would be committed. She would make an enemy of Jake Beard. He would come after her. But she was no hustler. She couldn’t play his game. She considered going back to the living room and explaining this to Ault and Beard. Ault would be cool, especially if she showed him how she could beat him. Beard wouldn’t. Since he was her protection and her ride home, he could be dangerous if he turned against her. She needed to get away from him.
    She threw her purse out the window. With her hands on the windowsill she pushed off from the toilet and found herself hanging over the sill, arms and upper body on the outside, legs on the inside, with her weight on her stomach. She couldn’t stay that way more than a few seconds.
    Scrambling furiously, she grabbed the sill and managed to twist her body around so her legs were outside the window. She was glad she had been doing stretching exercises that increased her flexibility. She hung from the sill by her hands and then dropped, landing awkwardly on the grass and falling onto her back.

    CHAPTER 18
    Carol got up slowly, hurting in several places, but she didn’t think she’d sustained any injuries worse than a few scrapes. She jogged toward the front of the house and immediately realized her shoes were not built for running. She needed to retrieve the athletic shoes she’d left in Beard’s car.
    The car was parked in the circular driveway near the front door of the house. Outside lights illuminated it, but the living room windows faced in another direction. She hadn’t been gone long enough yet to raise an alarm. She reached the car, fervently hoping it wasn’t locked.
    She tried the door on the driver’s side because it was facing away from the house. It opened to her pull. Beard must have been confident the locked gate would keep his beloved car safe. Giving a sigh of relief, she dove across the bench seat and grabbed the bag that contained her shoes from the floor. Backing out of the car, she closed the door until it was just ajar, but didn’t try to shut it. The noise of it latching might carry into the house.
    Carol crouched beside the car where she wasn’t visible from the house and changed her shoes. She forced herself to take a few extra seconds to make sure the laces to the athletic shoes were securely tied. It occurred to her the Cadillac was old enough that each door had to be locked