by JA Huss
A fingertip strokes along my cheek and I panic. He’s never touched me like that before. Not in a way that implies he’d rape me. But I can already tell this kidnapping is nothing like the last one. Last time he was very young. Early twenties at the most. Ten years later and that boy who wanted me to like him, wanted to win my cooperation with some sick form of domestic seduction that included keeping house and taking care of him the way a wife might, is gone.
In his place is a man who wants very different things. In his place is a man who wants… a woman.
“I’m still so young,” I try.
But his hand presses on my head even harder, making me whimper. “I’ve been patient, Daisy. I let you graduate from college. I watched you have your fun. Date a few men. Have sex. And now look, you’re nothing but a whore.”
Oh, God.
“You’re pregnant with another man’s child. If we want to be happy, that parasite inside you needs to be dealt with.”
And then his hand slips between my legs and shocks me out of my compliance. I elbow him, striking something hard, like his cheek or his neck, and he grunts in surprise. I have a split second of satisfaction before the throbbing in my head takes over.
“How dare you!” he bellows, his fist connecting with the back of my head over and over. “How dare—”
I elbow him again and this time I twist out from underneath him when he recoils. He recovers and pins my shoulders to the table with both hands. “I’ll kill you for that.”
I spit in his face. “No, you won’t. You want me. If you kill me, you can’t rape me.”
Besides, he’s got no free hands at the moment. It’s my turn to smile because he can’t hit me like this. If he lets go of one of my shoulders, I will fight.
“It’s not rape. You’re mine.”
“It is rape, you sick fuck. I will never let you rape me. Never. I hate your fucking guts. You ruined my life! You killed my parents!” I headbutt him, connecting with his nose, and blood starts to drip immediately. He recoils and one hand goes to his face.
I twist my body and draw up my leg, placing my knee between him and me, and then I kick him back. My fist connects with his ear and then automatically grabs for hair, but my fingers find the mask instead. I pull and this panics him. I pull harder, wanting to get that stupid mask off him even if I die trying. “Take it off, you coward! Take off your fucking mask.”
I rip it and he lets go of my other shoulder to try and stop me from removing his shield. I reach up and punch him in the face.
“You fucking bitch! I will kill your baby right now!” He regains control and pulls me up off the coffee table, then flings me down on the couch face first. I can hear his belt being unbuckled. “I’ll fuck it out of you, whore.”
“If you kill this baby,” I gasp through my labored breathing. “I’ll never be yours. Do you understand? If you kill this baby I will fight you until you kill me. I will never be yours!” I scream the last part and his whole body presses against my back. The weight of him makes it hard to breathe. Maybe he’ll suffocate me and this can all end for good right now?
“You don’t want to be mine,” he seethes into my ear. “You never did.”
“You killed my family, you freak! Why the fuck would I want anything to do with you?”
“They sold you!”
“No! You’re a lying asshole. You’re not even an original one, either.” I laugh this part out because it’s true. He’s a joke. His whole story is plagiarized from another case more famous than mine. “You’re a copycat! You’re nothing but a copycat. You think I never heard of the Black Hills kidnapper? How he took that little girl and kept her captive until she was grown up. Convinced her she was his wife and made her have his babies. You copied him and you didn’t even do a good job because you let me go. You’re weak and stupid.”
He goes still on top of me. “Is that what you think? That I let you go because I’m weak?”
A trap, Grace! It’s a trap. Say nothing!
“I let you go because you begged me for months.”
“Then why are you back? Just leave me alone!”
“Because, dear Daisy. You made me promise.”
“No!”
“Yessss,” he hisses back. “Yes. You were hysterical when I said I had to take you home. You cried, my little flower. You cried big fat tears and begged me to keep you.”
“No!”
“I tried my best to console you, but I had to drug you to calm you down.”
“That’s not how it happened! I fought you. I told you to kill me quickly, so I didn’t have to suffer.”
“You made me promise to come get you, Daisy. You made me promise that our love was true.”
“No, no, no! That’s not what happened!”
He gets up and walks across the room to the front closet. “I’ll prove it.” I just stare up at him. His mask is all crooked and there’s blood dripping down his neck from my retaliation. “I have you on tape, flower. I have it all on tape.”
He pulls out a shoebox and comes back to me. “Sit here.” He points to the couch.
I obey automatically. My mind is spinning. I know I was fucked up. I know I did agree to some things out of fear or brainwashing or whatever. But I didn’t want him to keep me. I wanted to be free. I did.
“Let’s watch it together, shall we?” He sits down on the couch and pulls out a video camera and some old tapes. The kind that go inside the camera and have to be played back.
I knew he taped me. I knew this.
But for some reason I had forgotten it.
Jesus.
What else have I forgotten?
Chapter Seventy-Five - Vaughn
#JustOneGuy
“SHE’S not close. This feels wrong.”
“Well, Vaughn, we have to start somewhere. There’s a reason they never caught the guy, OK? He’s smart. He’s calculating. He’s a planner. But everyone makes mistakes. Everyone leaves a trail. He had to have contact with Grace at some point. So someone saw him. Maybe not with her, but someone knows this man. And it’s our job to whittle away at the clues until we find that someone.”
I look down at Felicity and realize she’s in charge here. Not me. Not Conner, who is back in California sifting through records trying to make the connection Felicity is referring to.
“So come on. This is the current 4-H office. We should be able to get the names of past leaders from them.”
We enter the nondescript cinderblock building on the county fairgrounds and Felicity takes over. She talks in hushed tones about Grace, only she calls her Daisy. The women in the office nod solemnly and even though they should put up a fight about handing over information, they don’t. Small towns make regulations up as they go when circumstances are extraordinary.
This situation is certainly that.
We leave thirty minutes later with one name. There’s only been two 4-H leaders in this county for the past twenty years, and one died last fall. So… one name to go on.
“It’s better than no names, Vaughn.”
I say nothing.
It takes us another thirty minutes to drive to the farm where this woman lives, and by that time my body is pumped with adrenaline and my leg is bouncing.
Felicity knocks on the door alone. My movie-star status is not helpful. It’s a distraction. So I wait in the car and watch Felicity pantomime her request. I can see her in profile, so I imagine her questions as her lips move.
Can you think of anyone suspicious? Can you remember anyone taking an interest in Grace… only I’m sure Felicity calls her Daisy since that’s what these people know her by.
I imagine all the ways in which this woman say no, and then Felicity is walking back towards the car.
Felicity gets in and starts the car and then turns to face me. “She gave me a lead.”
My eyebrows go up in hope.
“Some guy in Alliance, Nebraska.”
“Tell me exactly what she said.”
“Well, she sa
id no to the suspicious people and all that. She said yeah, she remembers that camp trip because all the leaders that year were women and Grace was the only girl in archery. There was a rift in a group of friends who all hung out together and five of them took swimming instead of archery. Grace was a good archer, she won prizes at the fair every year. So she split up from them and went to the camp.”
“What else? That can’t be it, that’s not enough.”
“Well, that’s it for camp. But then I asked her about the special effects stuff. Did she know anyone who was into that sort of thing. And she said yeah. A 4-H club up in Alliance, Nebraska had an excellent theatre arts program in the high school for almost a dozen years. Some stage manager from Hollywood was from there when he came home after his father died, he stayed and taught theatre in school. She said he was gifted in that sort of thing.”
“Bingo. That’s our guy.”
“I don’t think so. He’s too old, V. That’s not him. But we can see him. Maybe he knows someone else who fits the profile?”
Fuck. “Fuck!” I say it out loud. “It’s gonna be dark soon and I swear, I just have this really bad feeling, Felicity. If it gets dark and we don’t find her, she might be gone forever.”
“We’ll just keep moving forward then, V. That’s all we can do.” Felicity picks up her cell phone and calls Conner to tell him what we found, but has to leave a message.
We ride in silence back to the airport and that lingers for the hour ride up to Alliance. Conner calls back and we check our name with his list, but this old ex-theater person is not on the Invisible Man roster.
Felicity is right. He’s probably not our guy. We can only hope that he gives us another clue once we talk to him.
Chapter Seventy-Six - Grace
#JustOneNameAsshole #GetItRight
AS soon as the video begins playing on the TV, I know I can’t watch it. I spring up off the couch, catching my captor off-guard, and lunge for the camcorder that’s plugged into the TV by a cable. My hand clenches around the cord just as he grabs my hair and flings me backwards. I crash into the coffee table and a sharp pain shoots up my spine.
The Invisible Man leans down into my face, spittle shooting out the hole he’s using as a mouth, and he seethes. “You. Will. Pay. For that.”
I spit in his face and he slaps me. Once to get my attention and again to make it hurt. My lip is split open in three places now.
He yanks me to my feet by my hair and pushes me face forward into the couch, straddling my waist.
“Get off me!”
“Listen to me, Daisy. You have forgotten the rules, but I understand. It’s been a long time. So I’m going to be very patient with you. I’m going to be very patient and start your training all over again. Tell me,” he whispers in my ear. Chills run up my spine and the hair on the back of my neck stands on end. “Tell me the first lesson you learned.”
“You need to be trained,” the man tells me from behind the mask of Danny. “So you know how to behave. So you know what’s acceptable and what’s not.”
I say nothing. I’ve got that part down. Silence is my friend. The first few times I tried to talk to him, he slapped me. The next few times he gagged me. When I moaned out a single complaint as I was gagged, he punched me.
Silence is my friend.
There are many other things that set him off, but I don’t know what they are exactly.
This one I know.
So I give him what he wants.
Nothing.
“Tell me!” he screams.
“No talking,” I croak out. The punishment is a swift smack to the back of my head. No talking means no talking. He did this to me often back when I was a girl. Make me answer a question then punish me for talking.
I can’t avoid the first hit, he makes sure of it. But as long as I stay silent, I can avoid the rest.
“OK.” He settles a little on top of me, his weight pressing me into the couch cushions so hard I have difficulty breathing. Maybe if I turn my head—
He yanks my face back with a firm grip on my hair. “I remember that trick.”
That trick, as he calls it, was me trying to smother myself when he was pushing my face into various things. The floor. The mattress in my closet. The pillows on the couch. I almost succeeded once, early in my captivity. But he caught on.
I lived. Again.
And again, living was not all it’s made out to be. It’s not always better to live.
“Tonight is our night, Daisy.”
He’s going to rape me.
“I’m going to show you how much I love you.”
After all this time, he’s finally going to get what he’s always wanted.
“And you’re going to respond with me the way you did with Asher.”
I don’t react. I can’t react.
“I saw you in the forest, Grace.” The venom spells out with my new name. “I found you a few weeks before that trip. I found your secret whore life on Twitter. And when you told the world about your honeymoon to the Caribbean, I had to go see who your new husband was. Imagine my happiness when I realized you were not on a honeymoon.”
He eases himself up off of me and then pulls me up by my elbow. It’s bent at a weird angle and I twist to relive the pressure and pain he’s inflicting. When I turn, we are face to face.
His mask is gone. His face exposed to me for the first time. It’s not a memorable face. It’s neither handsome or ugly. Brown eyes. Fair skin. Stubble that is not the least bit reminiscent of Vaughn’s sexy five o’clock shadow.
My stomach turns and I have to swallow down the bile as I avert my eyes. I’m relieved when I realize I don’t know him. I was always afraid I’d know him. He’d be someone I trusted. But he’s not. Just a psychotic stranger.
“Look at me.”
I don’t want to, but he grips my chin hard and yanks my head up. I force myself to meet his gaze.
“I was so happy when I figured out you were single. But then… all that died when I saw you with him. I’m going to kill him too—”
Too? He’s going to kill me first, then Asher?
“And I’m going to make him suffer. Even more than you.”
I chop him in the side of the neck, hammer-fist style, then follow it up with another one to the back of his head. He sways, but does not go down. Fuck! That shit’s supposed to work! I kick his feet so he loses his balance and he goes down, but he grabs my calf and takes me with him. I fling my fists wildly, but he’s so much bigger. So much stronger. I’m overpowered within seconds and a closed fist crashes against my temple.
I see stars. But I don’t give up. My hand reaches out, feeling the carpet for something, anything that I can use as a weapon. I’ve taken years of self-defense, I can do this! I can save myself!
A cord. I dig my fingers into his eyes. My other hand grips the plastic cord and yanks.
Another blow to the head and more stars. A lamp comes crashing down on the floor next to me.
He grips the hand that’s digging into his eyes and squeezes. I scream in pain, but my free hand grabs a shard of glass and stabs.
Blood is everywhere in an instant. It’s on my hand, on my clothes, splashing on my face.
“You fucking bitch! I’ll kill you now!”
I stab again and this time I hit him in the eye. He roars in pain, letting go of my crushed hand so he can manage the blood pouring out of his face.
I scramble up, crab-walk backwards a few paces and then get to my feet and grab an umbrella from a rack near the door.
He’s got one eye open, watching me stalk towards him. “What do you think you’ll do with that, Daisy?”
“It’s Grace, you asshole!” I stab him in the leg. Hard. Hard enough to puncture his jeans and his skin because blood shoots out from there too. He looks up and growls at me like an animal.
I grasp the pointed end of the umbrella and swing the handle at his face. It hits with a whack and he falls back to the floor.
“Asshole
!” I scream again as the adrenaline races through my body. “I hate you! I hate you!” I kick him in the stomach with my bare foot and then I step back, terrified that he’ll get back up, terrified that I won’t be able to get out of the house. Terrified that I’m still not safe.
I’m still not safe.
I lunge for the computer and pull up the only lifeline I have.
Twitter.
Chapter Seventy-Seven - Vaughn
#Profile
THE farmhouse looks cold and desolate. “Does someone live here?” Felicity asks.
I pull the rental car up to the dilapidated structure and turn the engine off. There’s cows in a pasture not too far off and the corn is tall and turning brown, indicating it’s almost ready to harvest, so apparently, that’s a yes.
My phone buzzes and I press Conner’s face. “Anything?”
“OK,” he starts, a little bit out of breath. “Here’s where we’re at. There’s a guy from Nebraska who did in fact work for Asher Productions a long time ago. Like back before the kidnapping took place. But he left and went to work—”
“In a high-school theatre department in the middle of Nebraska?”
“Yeah. How’d you know that?”
“We’re at his house right now.”
“This isn’t our guy. He’s too old. Maybe he’s got more info, so check that out. But the main thing I wanted to tell you is that he had a student who got a summer internship at Asher Productions after the old man left.”
“What’s his name?”
“Derek Hauser. And he fits the profile. Right age. Born and raised in Chadron, Nebraska—just north of the national forest. And I think if we dig deeper, we’ll find a record of him being at camp at the same time Grace was at archery camp. I’ve got the FBI looking into it.”
“So where’s he live? In California?”
“No. He quit his job a few weeks ago. Right before IM2 came out.”
