Under Abduction

by Andrew Neiderman

  They seemed to be riding forever.

  Anna felt them make many turns and she heard the heavy traffic. Then, after a wide turn, she hardly heard any other cars. Their bizarre singing had also stopped, and the strange couple barely spoke to each other. The car bounced on what was clearly an old road, maybe even a dirt road.

  The driver turned on the radio and dialed in a news station. They heard the bulletin about the abortion clinic and the death of Doctor Carla Williams.

  “Looks like we have something else to celebrate, don’t we, Mommy?”

  “Yes, we do, Daddy,” the driver replied.

  Despite Anna’s feeling that it couldn’t be any worse, the terror had just been turned up another notch. Her heart was beating so hard, she thought it would simply burst, and she had more trouble catching her breath. Every once in a while, she felt her face drain of blood. She told herself she had to battle to stay conscious. She was afraid of what they might do to her if she passed out.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Neiderman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN 13: 978-0-7434-1802-7

  ISBN 10: 0-7434-1802-6

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  For the faculty of Fallsburg High,

  alongside whom I spent some of

  the best years of my life

  Prologue

  Anna Gold stared at the telephone on her light maple wood secretary desk in the den as she slipped her left arm into her navy blue wool coat. She thought she could will the phone to ring, will her lover to follow through and, as he had promised, make her the most important person in his life. He should have called this morning to confirm their plans, all that they would do to make a future together, now that he knew she was pregnant with his child.

  She had waited until after lunch to go for groceries because she didn’t want to miss him, but here it was nearly one and he still hadn’t called. In fact, no one had called this morning, and the silence of her solitude hung in the air of her apartment with a heaviness that resembled the aftermath of a funeral.

  The lines were dead now between her and the people she loved and the people who should love her. She had acquaintances, superficial friendships with girlfriends who were citizens of the same country of loneliness, young women about her age who were searching for some meaningful relationship too. Her work as a paralegal at the public defender’s office had brought her into contact with many different kinds of people, but she had yet to find the close friend with whom she was comfortable enough to share intimacies—intimacies that, up until now, she had shared only with her sister. She had told no one except her lover and her sister that she was nearly two months pregnant. She had confirmed it herself with one of those home-test kits.

  Almost immediately in a panic, she had made inquiries about having an abortion and had even gone so far as to have an appointment with Dr. Carla Williams at the Mountain Clinic. But then she had calmed down and thought, If he loves me as much as he says he does and is ready to make this change in his life, why have an abortion? She never even told him she had gone to find out about it. As far as he knew, that wasn’t a choice, not with her religious background. And she was encouraged by the fact that he had never even suggested it.

  Instead he had sat there with that same sweet smile on his face, his hazel eyes brightening when she had told him, and he had nodded and said, “Well, I guess this means we’ll just have to move things along a little faster than I had anticipated. Nothing to worry about. I’ll be here for you; I’ll always be here for you.”

  He brought her to tears when he added, “You’ve given me a new lease on life, just when I thought I had made tragic mistakes and buried myself in misery. Thank you, Anna. Thank you for being here,” he told her, and they kissed.

  But that had been days ago, and he hadn’t called her this morning as he had promised.

  She began to button her coat, her fingers trembling with the disappointment that filled her with an emptiness, a hollowness in her chest. The third button from the top on her coat dangled ominously on loose threads. Anna was not the homemaker her mother had been and her sister was; she couldn’t mend clothing and she was, at best, a mediocre cook. Her mind had always been on what she considered more lofty endeavors. She wasn’t going to be frustrated in her pursuit of a career and a more cosmopolitan life, no matter what her family’s traditions were.

  She would have been a full attorney by now if her father hadn’t discouraged her and pulled back on the little support he had given her soon after her mother’s death. The estrangement that followed was destined. She believed it was built into her genes: She had inherited her father’s strong determination, and that, perhaps, was why they had been combatants for so long—they were too alike. Of course, her father would never admit to such a thing. She was merely rebellious, foolish, ungrateful. She couldn’t have a sensible discussion with such a man.

  Yet, his face haunted her at times like these. The vision of him furiously standing before her remained vivid. There were those big, dark eyes of his, tragic eyes that saw the world through shattered glasses. His shoulders, powerful though they were because of the work he did with stone, still always seemed sloped with the burden that followed two thousand years of persecution.

  “You are like their Christ,” she once accused, which brightened his face with the blood beneath his skin as she had never seen it brighten before. “You take all the misery onto yourself. You crucify yourself. Instead of nails in your hands, you pierce your soul with the pictures of the Holocaust or daily examples of anti-Semitism. You want me to march through endless cemeteries with you.”

  After the initial shock of her words, her father swelled, his shoulders moving up and back as if they were being pumped full of air, and he glared at her with that face of the prophets he often assumed and said, “You can run; you can hide. You can put a cross around your neck if you like, but you can never deny who you are and what you are.”

  Was he right? One of the things she had done when she first moved in here was put a mezuzah on the doorjamb. She couldn’t help it. It just seemed natural and she wasn’t ready to spit in the face of her faith. She simply wanted breathing room to become her own person. Was that such a terrible thing?

  At the door of her apartment, she paused and glanced at the phone on the side table in the living room. That one didn’t ring either. Of course, there was the answering machine, but her lover rarely left a message on it, and she knew that even if he did, she wouldn’t be able to get back to him.

  She hated herself for making herself so dependent on someone else’s schedule, responsibilities, and whims. How had she grown after escaping the confinement in her father’s house? Where was this precious freedom she had dreamt she would have?

  “I’m still no better than a puppet, and this time I have no one to blame but myself,” she muttered, and opened the door.

  Her apartment was in one of the new complexes built outside of Monticello, New York, the biggest village in Sullivan County and the center of county government. These were advertised and sold as garden
apartments, each with its own small balcony looking over the pool and landscaped commons. But being in upstate New York, the pool was utilized only between eight to ten weeks, if they were lucky, and during the long winter months, the flower beds were dead or brown, the bushes were thin, the walkways were usually streaked with mud, ice, or snow. Now the pool was an empty shell gathering debris.

  Except for attending Yeshiva University in New York and spending a year at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she had spent all of her twenty-six years in this area, the Catskill Mountains, once known as the Borscht Belt. But she was comfortable here and she could be on her own here; she still felt protected by familiarity. Setting out to start a new life in a completely new vicinity after cutting herself off from her father was too terrifying. Despite her need to be cosmopolitan, she was handicapped by her need for stability. It was part of the contradiction, the confusion of identity, that kept her searching for answers.

  Did she, as she naggingly feared, grab too quickly on to someone else’s affection?

  She had fallen in love, depended on someone’s promises, surrendered to passion and now—now she was in trouble because the clock was ticking. The magic of life, the making of a baby, had started. It wasn’t something planned, but the impulsiveness with which she and her lover had begun their relationship permeated everything they did. Everything they did was on the spur of the moment, which made it even more exciting. She was tired of being the well-organized, sensible young woman.

  One minute she was planning to make a cup of tea, read a book, and go to sleep, and the next moment she was rushing off to meet him at a motel or out-of-the-way bar and then a motel. It was wonderful to be taken by surprise, to defy what was sensible, to be carefree and throw caution overboard with the frenzy of one desperately trying to stay afloat.

  Sometimes they would be riding along talking, and suddenly he would stop, pull into a side road, and they would be at each other. She had never known such passion. She had had crushes on boys, but never developed a real relationship with anyone, even at the university. Maybe she was inexperienced and naive, more like an adolescent when it came to matters of the heart, but she truly believed her lover was just as taken with her as she was with him. In fact, he appeared to love her more for her simplicity and innocence. How many times had he told her she made him feel like a young man again, falling in love for the first time himself?

  If all that is so true, Anna, why the delay? Let’s get this life started, she thought. But now, with his hesitation, his hemming and hawing, his long list of excuses, she had grave doubts gnawing at her insides.

  And so, to abort or not to abort, that was the question—the question of the age, it seemed; only now it was dreadfully a personal question. She had been impressed with Dr. Carla Williams. The head of the clinic had taken great pains not to influence her one way or the other.

  “This has to be your sole decision, Anna,” she had told her. “I just give you the facts. I’m not anyone’s priest, minister, or rabbi. I have enough trouble looking after my own soul.” Anna liked her. If she was going to have it done, Carla Williams was the sort of doctor she’d want doing it, she thought.

  Anna knew what her sister, Miriam, had thought about it, but this wasn’t happening to Miriam; it was happening to her. Miriam couldn’t begin to understand, even though Miriam was older. Miriam was even more cloistered and inexperienced at matters of the heart than she was. Miriam could only gasp or exclaim or cry.

  Well, she wasn’t Miriam. She was her own person and she would make up her own mind. She vowed she would do whatever she had to do and be persuaded by nothing except her own feelings.

  “Don’t quote scripture at me, Miriam,” she told her. “This is the real world I’m in.”

  But her bravado weakened when she gazed at the mezuzah in the doorway. Despite her protest, moral law weighed heavy on her conscience. Independence and finding her identity was one thing; defiance was another. She closed her eyes, kissed the tips of her fingers, and then opened her eyes and touched the mezuzah before walking out and closing the door behind her.

  Anna moved quickly down the walkway toward the covered parking spaces. Each tenant had two, but she needed only one for her late-model Honda, which she had leased. Everything in her life was leased right now, including the furniture and the kitchen ware in the apartment. She had even rented her television set on a rent option to buy deal. At least she owned her clothes, some not-very-valuable jewelry, and the towels and linens.

  When she had left home, she had little more than a thousand dollars, but she had the job and the promise of some sort of future doing work she felt gave her life more meaning. It was enough to give her the courage to be on her own, and so she had been for nearly a year, but now she was also in trouble.

  Or was she? Perhaps he would fulfill his promises. Perhaps he was as deeply in love with her as she thought, hoped. If only he had called this morning, if only she had some concrete reason to be optimistic, if only…

  She started the engine and drove the mile and a half to the supermarket. Saturday was supermarket day for her now, but it wasn’t always. In fact, she never rode in a car on Saturdays, much less go shopping. As she drove through the quiet streets she envisioned her father’s face again, his grimace, the dark way his eyes turned down because of the shameful burden she had become.

  Even now, even after all this time and all she had done and said, she couldn’t keep out the tiny pinpricks of guilt that stabbed her heart. It was as if God were looking down on this stupid supermarket parking lot and making notes in his divine notebook.

  Anna Gold shopped and rode in her car on the Sabbath, and after I had strictly told them all: Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. This is keeping it holy? Comparing prices, clipping coupons, squeezing fruit?

  Anna laughed at her own imaginative deific dialogue. She didn’t intend to be irreverent or blasphemous, but as she had told Miriam, she simply wasn’t going to live in the Middle Ages, or even before the Middle Ages, which was how she characterized her father’s faith. Her sister stood in the hallway of their house with her mouth agape as Anna vehemently espoused her beliefs the day she left.

  “Religion has nothing in common with reality. One church still prohibits the use of condoms, even though a storm of dire disease, AIDS, rains down on humanity, while another prohibits sick children from getting the medicine they need or the blood transfusion they need. And we’re no better with our archaic kosher laws and our fanatical adherence to the Sabbath. The world still turns on Saturday, Miriam!”

  “Anna,” she gasped, “God is listening.”

  “If He’s listening,” she said, “He must be hysterical with laughter watching these holy men twist and turn what He created into their own creations.”

  Her sister’s face whitened. She looked to the living room where their father sat, fuming.

  Poor Miriam, Anna thought; she hated leaving her behind, but maybe that was where her sister would rather be, maybe that was where she belonged. They were sisters, but they really were two different people. Miriam wouldn’t be caught dead pushing a cart down a supermarket aisle on Saturday. She would be afraid her hands would burn.

  Anna smiled and shook her head at the thought as she moved along, pulling boxes rapidly from the shelves, pushing the cart down the aisle, nearly knocking over an elderly lady who was comparing prices. It wasn’t that crowded, however, so she was able to get to a checkout counter sooner than she thought. She wanted to get home just in case he called. This was the weekend he was supposedly telling his wife. This was the weekend it would really begin for them. On Monday she would be able to walk with her head high and stop feeling like a sneak.

  As she pushed her cart through the entrance of the supermarket and toward her car, she caught sight of a late-model Ford sedan parked to her left in a no-parking zone. The two people who sat up front, a young man and a young woman, were staring at her. The woman was at the wheel. Anna thought nothing of it until sh
e paused at her car, opened her trunk, and turned to see the sedan come up the lot toward her. She put her pocketbook in the trunk and loaded in the first bag. But then she paused again when the Ford came to a stop right behind her.

  The man stepped out quickly, a Model 10 Smith & Wesson .38 pistol clutched in his right hand. To Anna it looked like a cannon. She gasped at the sight of the gun: Her experience with weapons was practically nonexistent; in fact, she could count on her one hand how many times she had actually seen a gun in real life. She even hated seeing violence on television or in the movies and usually had her head down during those scenes. Some soldier in Israel she would make.

  Anna held her breath, her right palm over her heart. A holdup in broad daylight? These things happened only to other people and rarely in this semirural, laid-back world miles and miles from urban centers. At least, that was what she had believed up to this moment.

  Without saying anything, the man with the gun opened the side door of the car.

  “Get in,” he ordered. “Quickly.”

  Anna didn’t move. It was enough of a shock to think she was being robbed, but what he demanded now turned her heart to stone and made her tremble so, she thought her teeth would soon begin to chatter. She shook her head. It was all she was capable of doing. If she tried to run, she was sure to stumble.

  “Get in or I’ll kill you right here,” he said firmly. He had blue eyes that turned into glass. He looked younger than he apparently was; he had a baby face, soft cheeks, and thick red lips, but he looked hypnotized, crazed, far from an innocent, harmless child.

  “Who are you? What is this?” she asked, and at the same time gazed around for someone to help her.

  There was no one nearby. It was fall in the Catskills. Whatever tourists and summer visitors there had been were long gone, and the area had been returned to its small population of year-round residents. In some nearby hamlets a good twenty minutes could pass before a car would roll down Main Street.