by T. R. Ragan
She flipped over, sat up, then used her right hand to untie the ropes around her ankles. With no time to waste, she used her right arm to draw her left arm close to her chest, and coaxed her shoulder back into the joint. Relief followed.
She scrambled to her feet. Adrenaline kept her moving, kept her from passing out. A spider fell off of her head and landed on the floor in front of her. The eight-legged beast was big and hairy and brown. Barefoot, she used her toe to brush it aside, then frantically brushed bugs from her tangled hair. She’d been bit twice, maybe more.
Spiders were everywhere. They crept over the floor and around the pile of boxes. She held still and waited for the dizziness to pass.
Go, Lizzy. Get out of here.
Her leg nearly buckled on the first step, but she managed to cling to the wall to steady herself. She couldn’t worry about injuries and pain. She needed to get away.
She peered through a slit in the blinds. Iron bars framed the outside of the window. She hobbled to the door, surprised to find it unlocked.
She listened. Somebody was talking. Voices. A television was on. Quietly, she stepped into a hallway lined with thick carpet. The house looked new: fresh paint, new carpet, nothing on the walls.
One step at a time. Quiet. Slow. Her gaze connected with the front door, an ordinary entry door with a peephole and a chain. Her heart beat triple time.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. She wanted to run for the door but she refused to make any quick movements and attract unwanted attention. The chain on the door looked thick. Someone had bolted the chain with a heavy metal lock. Swallowing, she looked around the front room. A commercial for dog food was on the television. Her tongue felt thick and swollen. And then she saw him.
Holy Shit.
The maniac. The monster. Spiderman. Right there.
He was on the couch...asleep on the couch.
She would wake him if she tried to undo the lock and go through the front door. There had to be another door in the house. It didn’t take her long to find one. A sliding glass door situated between the kitchen and a small informal dining area. She would escape and she would live to see another day.
She hobbled toward the door. And then she heard a child’s cry...a long drawn out pitiful moan.
Boy? Girl? She had no idea. But someone else was in this house. She gnawed on her bottom lip. Outside, the sun was rising, lighting up the sky. From where she stood she could see a future. The dawn of a new day in reach...but there it was again.
“Aaaahhhhhhggg.”
Shit!
Limping back to where she’d just come from, her gaze fell to the man on the couch. He hadn’t moved. His eyes were closed. His neatly trimmed beard failed to hide a boyish face. His hair was dark brown and cut short around a big dopey looking ear; he had no gray. He was on his side. She could only see half of his face, enough to see a high cheekbone and a healthy tan. There it was again. The cry of a child. Not as loud this time. Why couldn’t she pull her gaze away from the monster? He didn’t look like a maniac. He looked like a businessman, someone she might pass on the street and say hello to. He looked “normal.”
She forced herself to go. She hobbled down the carpeted hallway, once again ignoring the excruciating pain in her leg and the pounding in her head. Mostly, she ignored the fact that she was a fool. And damn. She was going to throw up.
Three doors. One was the spider room. The other two doors were shut. She took hold of the knob to her right and twisted it slowly, careful not to make any noise as she peeked inside. It was a guest room. A perfectly normal guestroom with a bed half covered with a patchwork quilt. There was a bedside table with a light and a handmade frilly looking lampshade, the kind her grandmother used to crochet. Nothing in this house made sense. The house of horrors with fresh paint and handmade quilts. She headed for the next door and the moment she opened it she smelled something musty and moldy.
She put a hand to her mouth at the horror laid out before her. The odor was sickening: rotted eggs and dead rodents. A bed took up most of the small room. Propped on the top of two of the four bedposts were skulls...not the kind of skulls she’d seen in the doctor’s office. These skulls had stuff hanging off of them. Skin? Hair? Oh, God. She gagged.
A movement caught her attention—the source of the noise. There was a child on the floor. Thirteen? Fourteen? The kid’s arms and legs were nothing but bones, bound and tied to a bedpost. It was hard to tell whether the child was a boy or a girl, but going solely by the silver necklace around the neck, she guessed female. Her light brown hair had been cut short at weird uneven angles with a blunt knife. She was so thin. Her face was pale, her brown eyes large and round, bulging. The girl’s clothes were torn and bloodied.
Lizzy was pulling off ropes with her hands and loosening knots with her teeth before she even realized she’d moved toward the child. Tears streamed down Lizzy’s face as she worked. The girl couldn’t stand on her own, so Lizzy picked her up and ran out of the room and down the hall, grinding her teeth to stop from screaming out in agony.
She didn’t stop to look to see if the man was still on the couch. She needed to get the hell out of there. She ran toward the sliding glass door where she had no choice but to set the girl down so she could use both hands to unlock and open the door. When she finally picked up the girl again and stepped outside, she was blinded by the bright light of the sun. The branches of a big oak reached out to her. Other than the tree branches, she couldn’t see a thing.
At least not at first. It took a moment for Lizzy to see him.
He stood by the fence.
Waiting.
And the little girl in her arms must have seen him, too, because the strangest sounds were coming out of her mouth.
Chapter 3
Sacramento, California
Friday, February 12, 2010 6:06 PM
Lizzy stood front and center in the multi-purpose room at Ridgeview Elementary and pointed a finger at the young girl in the front row. “Heather, what’s the first thing you should do if you think somebody is about to abduct you?”
“Draw attention to myself.”
“Good. And what might be a good way to do that, Vicki?”
“Scream and kick.”
“That’s right.” Eight kids had signed up for Lizzy’s class tonight, all girls under the age of eighteen, but only six had actually shown up. Not bad for a Friday night. She’d been teaching kids how to protect themselves for the past ten years. She’d definitely had worse attendance, including a roomful of no-shows. It was easy to see who had been paying attention for the past hour and who had not. “How about you, Nicole? Come up to the front, please, and show us what you would do if somebody tried to take you against your will.”
Everybody waited quietly until Nicole was standing in the front of the room.
Lizzy used her chin to gesture at Bob Stuckey, the local sheriff whose daughter was in attendance tonight. He had entered the classroom ten minutes ago. He, along with a few other parents, waited patiently for the class to end so they could take their daughters home.
“Mr. Stuckey, would you mind helping me out?”
He hesitated, then shrugged and headed toward the middle of the room where Nicole stood with both arms straight and stiff at her sides.
Lizzy gestured for Bob Stuckey to go ahead and wrap his big beefy arm around Nicole. Although Sheriff Stuckey was clearly uncomfortable putting his arm around the child’s neck, and rightly so, he did as she asked.
“Okay, Nicole. What would you do if someone grabbed you, like Sheriff Stuckey is doing now, and told you to get into his car?”
Nicole swallowed. “I don’t know.” She made a feeble attempt to wriggle out of Sheriff Stuckey’s grasp, but she couldn’t get loose. “This is freaking me out,” Nicole said. “I don’t even want to think about it. I don’t know what to do.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “Please, let me go.”
Lizzy raised a brow at Bob, letting him know now would be a good time to let go of Nicole.<
br />
He quickly dropped his arm.
The girl obviously needed a few more sessions before she was used as a guinea pig. Lizzy pointed to the back of the room where one girl sat as far away from the others as she could possibly get. The girl couldn’t be much older than sixteen, maybe seventeen, but the five piercings on each ear, one on her nose, and one on each brow made her look older, tougher. Her black hair was short and spiky and, despite the February chill in the air, the girl wore a dark blue spaghetti-strapped top, a mini skirt, and worn sneakers without shoelaces. A tattoo of an angel on her collarbone stood out on her fair skin. Ouch.
“What about you?” Lizzy asked the girl. “What would you do if someone grabbed you?”
The girl chewed her gum, blew a bubble, a great big bubble that she managed to suck back into her mouth without leaving a trace of goo on her face. Impressive.
The cold and calculating look in the girl’s brown eyes was supposed to cover up what Lizzy guessed to be a severe case of loneliness.
“What’s your name?” Lizzy asked.
“Hayley Hansen.” She pulled the wad of gum out of her mouth, stuck it to the bottom side of the desk, then stood and headed for Sheriff Stuckey, who looked more than a little worried by the girl coming toward him.
“Go ahead,” Lizzy told Sheriff Stuckey when Hayley stopped in front of him and turned toward the class.
Sheriff Stuckey put his arm around the girl’s neck, locking her in by grasping his other hand around his forearm.
“Okay,” Lizzy said to Hayley. “You’re in the park and this guy has just walked up behind you and put a stranglehold on you.”
Hayley looked bored out of her mind.
“What would you do?”
“I’d bite a chunk out of the motherfucker’s arm.” And then she went on to demonstrate.
“Ow! Shit!” Bob Stuckey yanked his arm away and jumped back. “Jesus.” His long-sleeved shirt was torn and blood began to seep through the cottony fabric.
Lizzy ran to the other side of the room and grabbed the first aid kit. She handed the plastic box to Sheriff Stuckey and ushered him toward the bathroom.
Parents murmured worriedly to one another.
Once Lizzy found her place at the front of the class again, a few random giggles erupted on one side of the room. Jane Stuckey, Sheriff Stuckey’s fifteen year-old daughter, turned toward the other girls. “It’s not funny.”
“No,” Lizzy agreed, “there’s never anything funny about someone getting hurt.” Lizzy looked at Hayley, who had returned to her seat at the back of the room. “Hayley, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn’t mean to hurt Sheriff Stuckey, but I am also going to remind each and every one of you,” Lizzy said, making eye contact with every girl in the room, “that this is serious business. And for that reason I’m going to use what Hayley just did to Sheriff Stuckey as an example of what you should do in this type of situation. How many of you think Hayley would have gotten away if she was attacked?”
They all raised their hands.
Lizzy nodded in agreement.
One of the teenager’s mothers, who had been sitting at the far side of the room through the entire class, bolted to her feet and said, “I don’t see how biting an officer of the law could ever be used as an example of the right thing to do.”
Lizzy sighed. “That’s because you, Mrs. Goodmanson, have never been held against your will, have you?”
Mrs. Goodmanson opened her mouth to respond, but Lizzy didn’t give her a chance to say anything. “Were you ever told to do something you didn’t want to do, something you knew was wrong? Were you ever touched improperly? Have you ever had a knife put to your throat, Mrs. Goodmanson, or had a gun held to your head?”
The woman shook her head and sank back into her seat.
Lizzy turned back to the kids whose eyes were now big and round and curious. For the first time since they entered the classroom, Lizzy had their full attention. “Swear, curse, bite, kick,” she said loudly, sternly as she paced the front of the room. “Do anything you have to do to get away. Yell at the top of your lungs, ‘HELP, I DO NOT KNOW THIS PERSON!’ If you’re on a bike, do not get off or let go of the bike. If you do not have a bike, run in the opposite direction of traffic and scream as loud as you can.”
Lizzy anchored loose strands of hair behind her ear as she continued to pace the length of the room, using bold gestures to make her point. “If you can’t get away and you do somehow end up in the abductor’s car, roll down the window and scream. Scream every bad word you can think of...anything that might get somebody’s attention. If you come to a stop sign or stop light, jump out of the vehicle and run! If the car is moving and you’re in the passenger seat, grab the keys from the ignition and toss them out the window or toward the backseat. While he goes to retrieve them, get out of the car and run.”
She let her gaze roam slowly about the room before she asked, “Do you understand me?”
The giggling had stopped a while ago. A severe hush floated across the room.
Every kid in the room nodded, except Hayley Hansen, who looked as if she already knew everything there was to know about bad people in the world. Bad people who did horrible things to innocent people for no reason other than to hunt and victimize, reliving their grotesque fantasies in their minds until the next time.
Sacramento, California
Monday, February 15, 2010 9:12 AM
Lizzy squeezed Old Yeller, her faded 1977 Toyota Corolla, between two cars parked on J Street, climbed out and headed down the sidewalk toward her office. Although it was past 9 a.m., a layer of thick fog still floated below the bare branches of the tree-lined street.
The cold nipped at every part of her. Lizzy rubbed her arms, and then shoved her hands deep into her coat pockets. She was cold. She was always cold. Her sister, Cathy, said it was because she didn’t have enough meat on her bones. Maybe so, but one of these days she was going to move to Arizona or Mexico, maybe Palm Springs, somewhere hot, where she wouldn’t have to wear gloves and two pair of socks. Her hands were just getting warm when she pulled them out of the warmth of her pockets so she could open the door to her office.
She admired the newly etched sign on the door: “Elizabeth Ann Gardner—Private Investigator.” A much appreciated gift from her sister.
Lifting her elbow, she tried to wipe a smudge from the glass but the door came unexpectedly open. She wasn’t expecting any clients. She wasn’t married. No ex-husband. No boyfriend. No kids. One vacationing intern. One fourteen year-old niece and one sister, neither of whom had a key, which meant she had been burglarized.
Poking her head inside the front room, she heard the faint rustling of papers in the back room. Change the phrase “had been” burglarized for “was being” burglarized.
She slid her hand beneath her jacket and felt her Glock .40 snug within her holster. She unsnapped it and brought the gun to her side. Although Lizzy had never had to use the gun before, she’d been wearing one for ten years now. It was her friend. It made her feel safe.
The door jamb showed no sign of forced entry. She opened the door wide enough to squeeze her way inside without making any noise. Despite her niece’s attempt to fatten her up by shoving Rice Krispy treats down her throat when she visited, Lizzy had lost another three pounds. She wasn’t trying to lose weight. She just wasn’t hungry. Food didn’t turn her on. Sometimes she wondered if anything turned her on, although she did have a weakness for peanut M&M’s.
She glanced at her desk. Computer was off. Papers scattered in an unorganized mess. Half chewed pencils sticking out of a weird looking jar her niece had made for her; everything was just the way she’d left it. Not even a burglar would attempt to find anything of interest in this mess.
But little did the burglar know that her sister had forced her to start writing a daily journal all in the name of catharsis, figuring if she barfed up all her emotional baggage onto paper, then she’d be restored to a better,
newer, purer self. Her sister considered writing in a journal to be an emotional cleansing. All that electrifying enlightenment was right there on her computer saved under “stuff.” And to think the burglar thought the goods were back in the safe.
She took quiet steps toward the back office, which was really a large closet in disguise. The rustling noises grew louder. Somebody was definitely a busy little bee.
Lizzy’s adrenaline pumped in earnest now. A little adventure, a little excitement—just what the doctor said she didn’t need. Yep, her sister, Cathy, wasn’t too far off when they’d argued the other day and Cathy had called her “one sick puppy.” But Cathy wasn’t the local girl known as the “one-who-got-away” either. Cathy hadn’t spent two months of her life with a sick-minded, spider-loving maniac.
Lizzy’s gaze shifted to the floor. No signs of wet or muddied footprints, only ugly beige carpet that needed a good cleaning. She had her priorities though. And cleaning the carpet was pretty much the last thing on her list—right under scrub the shower tiles, shop for groceries, and take the car in for a long overdue tune-up. If anyone was going to get a tune-up it was going to be her, not an old car with a broken tailpipe and a mind of its own.
The file drawer clamped shut with a bang, giving her a start. The door to the back office/closet was ajar. She could see a pair of boots. Somebody was leaning over the bottom drawer of the file cabinet.
“Put your hands up or I’ll shoot!”
Two hands shot up. Papers flew. “It’s me, Jessica. Don’t shoot.”
Lizzy pushed the door wide.
Jessica looked relieved to see that it was only her, but even so, she kept her gaze glued to the gun’s barrel while she held her arms straight up in the air.
Lizzy frowned and lowered her weapon. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were on a plane headed for Jersey?”
Jessica Pleiss, psychology student at Sacramento State and brand new intern that Lizzy didn’t need or want, but who she’d “hired” because Jessica had a knack for talking people into things they didn’t need or want, dropped her hands to her side and said, “Jersey didn’t work out, so I thought I’d spend my week off from school organizing these files. Did I leave the door open again?”
