“Lock the doors after me. Lock the door to your trailer when you go to it. Text me before you go anywhere. Keep your cell phone battery charged at all times,” he orders. The demands come out like a list in his head.
“Yes, sir,” I whisper. No sarcasm. I’m terrified. Men stealing women my age, including my best friend, and dismembering them has that effect on me.
“Where are you going today?” he asks.
“Cindy texted me. Needs help at the shelter now that Minnie’s in the hospital. I thought I’d go there.”
He nods. “Just stay the hell away from Eric and Claudia. Don’t go to the coffee shop today. Stick to the no-kill shelter. That’s probably the safest place you can be today, honey.”
And with that, the front door slams.
Honey.
He called me honey.
I smile in spite of the somber topic we just discussed. How can I be happy when there’s a serial kidnapper who just turned into a killer and he chopped that poor woman’s arms and legs off?
And the same guy has my best friend?
The same best friend I would be on the phone with right this very second if she weren’t gone.
I finally did it. Mark and I made love. We’re back together.
I’m a woman now.
I snort as I think that last sentence. I’m a woman now was part of a longstanding joke Amy and I had together, for years. When we were teens we were watching television at my house one day and a tampon commercial came on.
The daughter said to her mother, “Does this mean I’m a woman now?” and my dad happened to walk in at that exact moment. He turned a shade of red found mostly on traffic lights.
Amy and I had spent the better part of a decade making fun of everything under the sun by saying I’m a woman now.
And yet…it feels true. Mark makes me feel more womanly.
The door opens again and he’s jogging down the hall toward me.
My heart freezes.
“Is everything okay—”
His mouth takes mine in a fevered kiss that shatters all thought. I’m splintered and floating, his mouth taking liberties I can imagine him taking with his hands. Lower.
He pulls back, worry etched on his face.
“I couldn’t just leave,” he says, panting.
I kiss his neck. Then I lick his collarbone.
Bzzzz.
He growls and stands, breaking the embrace. “Tonight?” he calls back over his shoulder as I watch his perfect ass walk away.
“Tonight what?”
“Tonight. You. Me. Dinner.” He waves a hand in the air. “This.”
“This what?”
“Sex. Lots of it. I want to hear you scream my name like you did last night.” And with that, he comes back, gives me a quick, hard kiss and storms out, leaving me breathless and aroused.
My thighs tingle.
Maybe I should have jumped in the shower with him, after all.
My turn to growl.
With a deep sigh, I walk into the tiny bathroom. The shower is about three feet by three feet. He wasn’t kidding when he said there might be room for two.
Might.
As I get under the hot water, the first wave of unreality really hits me. The water washes away the evidence of last night and this morning. I’m not a virgin any more. I slept with Mark. We made love—twice!—and I feel transformed.
It’s as if there has been this secret dimension right in front of my face all these years. One I never knew existed. A grounded feeling fills me. I’m warm and calm. I shouldn’t be. Amy’s been kidnapped. My dad was framed and died in prison. I’ve come home to a giant mess.
And yet I am calm. Focused.
Happy?
I thought it would take years and years to finally be able to say that. I’m happy. I’m happy right now, even in the face of so much tragedy.
Weeds can grow and flower in a tiny crack in the sidewalk. I guess I can find a tiny sliver of happiness in the middle of so much pain.
Chapter Thirty-Two
As I head out of Mark’s cottage, I lock his front door. My backpack is heavy on my shoulder. I turn around and wham—I run smack into Elaine and Brian’s oldest son, Daniel.
“Carrie!” he says, shocked to see me slipping out of Mark’s place. His face goes from surprised to cunning. He looks at my wet hair and guilty face and knows the drill. “You and Mark? Together again?”
“What, you haven’t heard?” I pretend to be more jaded than I really am. “Your mom found out this morning. I figured half the town knew by now. She just found out an hour ago. Her gossip powers must be fading.”
He snorts. “Actually, she’s why I’m here. She wanted me to check up on you.” Daniel uses finger quotes for the words check up.
“Seriously?”
“It’s my mom. What did you expect? She’s probably planning which scent to use for the birdseed for your wedding by now.”
We share a quick hug. Growing up, we were buddies. For a short time, I had a crush on him. Later, he had a crush on me. Now, we’re just friends. Daniel looks like Brian, all burly and blonde. We stopped hanging out on the same circles by our junior year of high school. He went for vocational school and I was in the academic track. There’s no bad blood between us.
We just grew up and grew along different paths.
“How’s your first week home?” he asks. I know he’s just being polite. Making small talk.
“Uneventful,” I deadpan.
He winces. “Oh. Yeah. Amy. Mom’s trying to help Minnie but…sheesh. What a fuckin’ mess.”
I don’t know whether I can say anything about the body the police just found. I just nod and try to fight the giant balloon of tears that’s swelling inside every cell of my body. Daniel’s a good guy. He looks down and kicks the dirt at his feet, suddenly uncomfortable.
I wipe a stray tear from my eye with the butt of my hand. “It’s okay. I mean, no, it’s not okay. Amy’s kidnapped and no one knows where she is and who knows if she’s hurt or dead or…” I burst into tears, the emotion like having a door smack shut by a surprise gust of wind.
Daniel looks alarmed. “Uh, do you want me to text my mom? Because she might be good with this.” He reaches out and pats my shoulder like he’s petting a robot dog.
I laugh through my tears. Daniel was never good with emotions. Cars? Sure. People?
No.
“I’m fine,” I say, sniffling.
“Sure you are.”
I give him a weak smile and he grins back. For a second, he reminds me of Mark. A less comfortable, quieter version of Mark.
Mark. Mark’s hands on me, inside me, the rhythm of our sex like the tickling of love’s timeless clock….
“You look like you’re overheating,” Daniel says, fear in his voice. “It’s a hot day, but you turned bright red so fast, Carrie. And now you’re sweating. Are you having a heart attack or something?”
Only down below, I think.
Daniel takes my arm and pulls me away from Mark’s place. “How about we walk? You could use some fresh air.”
We walk in silence to my trailer. Daniel breaks the quiet by saying, “Oh. Yeah. Mom asked me to tell you to make sure you forward your mail.”
“I what?” Of all the sentences Daniel could say to me, that wasn’t one I was expecting.
“Forward your mail. She said she hasn’t received any mail for you and is worried you forgot to put in a mail forwarding order.”
“Does she need to remind me to eat all my veggies and brush my teeth before bed?” I joke.
He grins. “You forgot to wipe your ass.”
We laugh. It feels weird. Good, in that it relieves tension, but it’s like the kind of laugh you give after someone farts and everyone heard it.
“Tell her I’ll do it this morning before I go to the shelter to help out,” I say.
“Wipe your ass?” Daniel jokes.
I elbow him and he laughs, a belly laugh. A real chuckle. The awkwardness
is gone. We’re back to being silly kids again.
Daniel gives me a salute and walks back to the main house without another word.
Instead of going to my trailer, I climb in my car, insert the key in the ignition, and close my eyes.
Turn over.
Ah. For once, my beater car listens to me. The air ripples with the putt-putt-putt of my engine as I back up, then drive the five minutes to the post office before it closes.
Elaine is right. I should have forwarded my mail earlier in the week. And she’s doubly right: I did forget to do it when I left Oklahoma City. Taking care of basic life issues was dead last on my list of things to worry about. Once the job at Yates was dangled in front of me, I got out of Oklahoma as fast as I could.
Mark’s touch lingers on my skin as I hold the pen in my hand, filling out the form. I showered, and my hair is wet and limp in my face. One strand dangles over the paper, damp enough to be dark but not so wet that it drips on the paper.
I finish the mail forwarding form and slip it in the post office mailbox. The line is long and filled with college kids holding package slips. I wonder why their parents didn’t send them packages to their dorm rooms.
I shrug. Not my problem. I climb back in the car and start to drive back, to change clothes and sit and stare at the ceiling for a thousand years as I try to understand the past week of my life.
I reach for my phone to call Amy and—
Oh, God.
I can’t call Amy.
A hole starts to grow inside me, like a piece of wet clay on a potter’s wheel. If you take a piece and straddle the spinning wheel, with a single fingertip you can create an instantaneous crater. The clay separates, parting like Moses at the Red Sea. It’s marvelous to make your hands do that, to have command over a swiftly-moving piece of anything.
And to turn it into something else, even temporarily.
When I realize I can’t call Amy, my chest feels like the hole a potter makes in the center of a grey blob.
My best friend is being held against her will by some asshole who thinks he has the right to kidnap her. There is a piece of human excrement who calls himself human out there, preying on women and hoarding them. Hurting them.
Cutting off their arms and legs.
Amy might be—
A wave of utter pain rolls through me like a whip being cracked. A sharp pain jolts me, my eyes blurring. It’s hard to watch the road.
Then the bile fills the back of my throat. I smell something burning.
It’s my brain.
Over and over, for the past three years, I have had a single thought. It makes up the fabric of my life. This thought is the first thing I think when I wake up. It’s my last thought before I sleep. In my dreams, it repeats in an endless loop, like cloth woven from sheer pain.
I can’t take it any more.
I can’t take it any more.
I can’t take it any more.
Isn’t there a limit to how much one person can endure? I pull over the car. The pain in my stomach isn’t going away. A metal anvil has taken up residence where my gut used to be. As the car tires come to a halt I jump out and run over to the passenger side, throwing up just as I get away from the car door.
My stomach empties. All the coffee and an apple I had at Mark’s cottage pours out. My body keeps heaving, as if it’s trying to rid me of more than the contents of my stomach.
As if I could throw up the entire world.
If I could, I would.
The bile burns. My eyes fill with unwanted tears. The stabbing feeling in my gut goes away. My legs turn to rubber and I sit on the berm, a mix of gravel and grass that digs into my butt.
And then I cry until I am so dry there are no more tears.
Amy is gone. Dead? I don’t know. Dismembered—I can’t think that word. No. No!
I scrape my palm against the sharp gravel. My skin tears, blood pooling along the scratch.
I can’t let myself think that way. I can’t go there. My fear is a big ball that lives inside me.
The very real fear that Amy is dead.
Or worse.
An image of an armless, legless woman fills my mind. I’ve never seen one, so my mind has to create it.
Imagination can be a curse.
I have been home for six days. Six. I drove into town last Sunday, and today is Saturday. Not even a week has gone by. A stray leaf floats on a light wind. It’s narrow and dried, and catches on the ends of my hair. My nose is full and I sniff, inhaling hot air and sorrow.
I’m sitting on the side of the road, too tired to cry any more, too empty to care.
Except that’s a lie, like all the other lies that have swirled around me for the past three years.
I do care.
I care too much.
Images flip through my mind like old movies, flickering frame by frame. Daddy carrying me on his shoulders at the Fourth of July parade when I was little. Drinking out of the water hose in the backyard. Trying out for cheerleading team in middle school and failing. Graduating high school and how proud Dad was. Moving into the dorms across town and how Dad cried.
The day Mark came to arrest Dad and cuffed him. How Amy came and got me, took me to the police station, held my hand.
Elaine, sitting in the defense attorney’s office with me, holding my hand as the lawyer explained everything.
The look on Dad’s face when he was declared guilty.
How he looked at me with an expression of such horror and regret and—God help the bastards who framed him for this crime—shame.
Daddy’s shame that he had let me down, even when he’d done nothing.
Not one damn thing.
All those images dissolve. I become nothing. I sit on the side of the road and an ant tickles my ankle. I see it, a black speck, traversing my skin in a lazy line. It’s determined to find something. Food? Water? Shelter? Something I can’t give.
Isn’t that what life is, really? Nothing more. Nothing less. We seek something we can’t define. We explore a life we can’t predict.
The sound of tires crunching on stone makes me look up. A little compact car, the same make and model as mine but new, pulls up. I hear the engine stop. A car door opens, then shuts.
Men’s sneakers appear, attached to legs in jeans.
“Carrie?” says a familiar man’s voice.
I look sideways, under my hair, and realize I’m completely alone. My phone, purse, and keys are in the car.
The man is Eric.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I flinch as our eyes meet. His are filled with worry.
And compassion.
And something I can’t define.
He reaches a hand down to pull me up. I don’t move. Just stare at him.
He lets out a sad sigh. “I guess I deserve that,” he says slowly, bending to sit on the ground a few feet from me. Eric props his elbows on his knees and sits across from me. “Yesterday I was an ass. I am so sorry.”
Mark’s words pop into my head:
Stay the hell away from Eric and Claudia.
How can I do that when I run into them nonstop?
“Thanks,” I reply. I know the old Carrie would have said, It’s okay or No problem.
The new Carrie won’t do that. He really was an ass. The truth hurts.
So does having my best friend kidnapped and missing. If Mark thinks Eric might be involved, then maybe I need to do my own sleuthing. Mark’s overly worried about me. I can take care of myself, especially with Eric.
He’s over-reacting. Eric would never harm me.
“Did I hurt your wrist?” Eric asks.
I look down.
Okay, let me amend that. Eric would never intentionally hurt me.
“Yeah, but it’s not bad,” I mutter. Damn. There I go again. I shuffle my feet and literally bite my tongue. I need to stop talking. The more Eric says, the more I’ll learn.
“I really meant what I said back at the office,” Eric adds. He’s wear
ing a hunter green polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers. The green sets off his hair and creamy Irish skin, making him look very crisp. Like something from an L.L. Bean ad.
“What you said? You mean your threat?” My skin starts to crawl. Sitting here, no one can even see us. We’re hidden by my parked car.
Eric could do anything to me right now and I would have no way of getting any help.
“Threat?” His eyes go wide and he looks horrified. This is more like the Eric I remember from when I was his student. Earnest. Helpful.
Nice.
“You told me not to mess with the Landau family. You grabbed my arm and hurt me.” Mark warned me about Eric and Claudia. Eric warned me about the Landau family.
I’m sensing a pattern here.
“I didn’t mean it as a threat, Carrie!” He reaches for a handful of dead grass and starts ripping it in his hands, shredding it. “That was a warning. They’re dangerous.”
“Dangerous? How?” I play it cool. Meanwhile, my heart’s thumping in my chest like popcorn in a JiffyPop.
“They’re playing a game and innocent people get hurt.”
“A game?”
His shoulders sag. The collar of his shirt is folded inward. I instinctively reach over and pull it out, putting it where it belongs.
Eric’s eyes go a deep color. Oh, God. Is that passion? His face moves toward me. My mind spins a thousand miles a minute as I realize he’s coming in for a kiss.
He’s about to kiss me? Seriously?
And then:
“STAND UP AND PUT YOUR PALMS FLAT AGAINST THE CAR.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The megaphone makes us both jump. Red and blue lights flash as we stand. It’s a cop car.
Mark is at the steering wheel.
And his gun is pointed straight at Eric.
“I SAID GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS UP!”
“No! No!” I shout as I walk toward Mark. “It’s not what you think!”
Eric grabs my arm and pulls me back. Mark leaps out of the driver’s side. There is another officer in the car with him who also has a gun trained on Eric.
“GETDOWNGETDOWNLETHERGOGETDOWNNOW!”
Dangerous To Love Page 182
