by Carla Norton
There had been a fight, it sounded like. Not long, half a minute, maybe. A scuffle. And when Jay came slinking back downstairs, carrying that damn sheet, there was a scraped place on his forehead that was starting to swell.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. He locked her hands in the cuffs, muttering that he was sorry, that it was “barbaric, three days in a row.”
Now the room is too warm. Hannah gets up again and turns the heat down, comes back to bed and sprawls atop the pink quilt. She glares at the bright posters of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, at the stacks of stupid magazines. “It’s all so fucking ridiculous,” she says, peering into the toy bear’s black eyes. “It’s just fucking straw for this fucking cage.”
FIFTY-TWO
Reeve is scanning the cabin’s blank windows, weighing whether it’s even worth the effort to get out and knock and ask directions, when the front door cracks open, revealing the shape of someone standing in the darkness.
The hair on the back of her neck stands up.
Get over yourself, she thinks, and punches the button to roll down the window. The cold air rushes in.
“Excuse me,” she hollers, waving. “Could you please—”
“You’re trespassing! Get the hell off my property!” the man shouts, stepping toward her.
“But I just—”
“I’m warning you.” The man swings his arm up to eye level with the unmistakable glint of a gun barrel. “I have the right to protect my property. Now get the fuck off!”
She stomps on the gas, cranking the steering wheel hard, and the Jeep spits gravel as it lurches off the driveway and jumps over the ditch. The tires grip pavement and the steering wheel is slick in her hands as she looks back to see the flash and hear the crack of gunshot.
She races back down the hill, and as soon as she finds her way to the freeway, pulls over, shaking. She can’t believe she’s been so stupid. She grabs her phone, grateful to find service, and sends Nick Hudson a text:
Need to talk! Can we meet?
Relieved to see headlights zipping down the freeway, she sets her phone aside and accelerates up the on-ramp, out of the godforsaken wilderness. All the way into town, she keeps replaying what just happened.
But somehow, it doesn’t come out right when she tries to explain it to Hudson.
“Let me get this straight,” he says, interrupting her. “You asked a real estate agent to print out this list of houses with basements, and then you rushed off to do what, exactly? To investigate? Am I getting this right?”
“Well, yes, I guess that’s what I’m saying.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this. I thought you were charging down here to complain about your ID being leaked to the press.”
She waves this off. “That’s not the important thing.”
“We didn’t leak it, you know.”
“Aren’t you listening to me? I was shot at!”
He makes a face she hasn’t seen before and shakes his head. “By a stranger in the dark, down a road that you can’t identify.”
She glares at him.
He looks away and blows out air.
“You have to do something. This is serious.”
“Reeve, listen … I’m not a detective. I’ve been assigned a job with Jackie Burke’s office, and I’ve been there barely six weeks. What is it you expect me to do?”
“I want you to do what cops do! I want you to investigate, find this guy!”
“You can file a report, but you just said that you don’t know where you were. And if they happened to find this mystery man, it would be his word against yours.”
“He shot at me!”
“Okay, but look, you weren’t hit, were you? And your car’s okay? So even if I believe you—and I do, okay?—but who else is going to? I’m sorry, but there’s no evidence. You can’t expect detectives to traipse around the woods and accuse every hunter with a gun.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”
“Okay, let’s start over. Can you describe the man?”
She makes a growling sound. Then, reminding herself that the office is almost empty, and that he has stayed late to meet with her, she takes a deep breath and tries to calmly explain what happened, being careful not to mention anything about Tilly. But somehow, again, it doesn’t come out quite right. And before she can fully explain, she makes the mistake of saying, “The point I’m trying to make is that now Emily Ewing is dead, and I think she was murdered.”
“What?”
“To shut her up. Don’t you get it? Emily Ewing was killed because she knew something.”
Hudson sits down, puts his elbows on his desk, and cups his face in his hands. “I can’t believe this. Now you’re saying you have evidence of a murder?”
“Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but you have to listen, because I think—”
“You know we have a little thing called a homicide division, right?” He gives her an exasperated look. “You understand how that works? It might be hard for you to imagine, but civilians aren’t invited.”
She closes her eyes briefly, then tries a softer approach. “At least consider it, okay? Can’t you please just look it up, or check, or something?”
With a shrug, he turns to his computer and begins clicking through screens. But after a few minutes, he shakes his head. “Here’s the report. Emily Ewing’s death was accidental. She fell, hit her head, and drowned. Weird. Sad. But accidental.”
“But it wasn’t an accident! You need to take another look at the crime scene.”
He scoffs. “You need to stop watching so much TV. There’s nothing to indicate murder, and I’m not about to second-guess the coroner.”
“No, look, she gave me this listing of homes with basements,” she says, holding up the pages. “And both of the places that Vanderholt rented are on this list.”
Hudson snatches the list from her fingers and flips from page to page, scowling. “This is crazy. Don’t you think this is already being investigated? Why are you even trying to get involved in this?”
“Don’t be mad. I was just trying to … I was just intrigued by the—”
“This is dangerous, Reeve, and it’s not your business. I told you, there’s an entire task force already working on this.”
“But can’t you see? Whoever killed Vanderholt must have killed Ewing. And the killer’s the link to those two other missing girls.”
“Reeve,” he says, shaking his head, “it’s not your job to try to find those girls. We have a team of investigators working every aspect of the kidnappings, every wrinkle of Vanderholt’s death. We’ve got experts combing the evidence, even the FBI.”
She wants to scream that one of his colleagues is a stalker, a kidnapper, a murderer.
“They’ve looked at all the angles, believe me. We’ve got people working this, okay? And they’re smart, trained professionals.”
“Your point being that I’m not.”
“Absolutely you’re not,” Hudson says, standing.
“Okay, okay, just give me back my list,” she says, reaching for it.
“No,” he says, snatching it back. “You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. Leave the investigating to the cops.”
“You sound like Burke.”
“Like I said, trained professionals.”
“Okay, I get it.”
He stops and scowls at her. “I don’t think you do. You’ve been sniffing around this case since the day you got here, but this has to end. You’re not armed, you’re not a cop, and I don’t want to see you get hurt. So just do your consulting thing with Tilly and back away before you stumble into something and screw it up.”
“But the point is—”
“The point is that it’s not your job.”
“But I—”
“Back off, Reeve. I mean it. You’re out of your depth.”
FIFTY-THREE
Tuesday
At 5:44 A.M., Reeve gasps awake. Her crotch is wet, her skin is hot a
nd charged. Was she dreaming about Nick Hudson?
She wrestles with the twisted sheets, wondering if sex and anger are forever linked in her psyche, worrying that she’s deeply deviant, that she’s cursed with the grime left by Daryl Wayne Flint.
Because sex is supposed to be gentle and loving and soft, isn’t it?
She flips the light on, feeling overheated, and gets out of bed to pace around and cool off. She scavenges around for something to eat or drink, but finds only sodas, alcohol, and boring snacks. Nothing chocolate.
Remembering a vending machine in the hall, she pulls on some clothes and returns a few minutes later with a package of Oreo cookies. She eats them with a glass of tap water, then takes a long shower and climbs back into bed.
An hour later she’s still hungry, still awake, still thinking about her fight with Nick Hudson. She tries to tell herself that she should just let it go.
But Emily Ewing is dead—murdered!—and Nick won’t even listen to her. And he took her list. Meanwhile, the killer is still out there, Tilly is still in danger, and the other girls are god knows where. Maybe when Dr. Lerner is back in town, when he’s back from Daryl Wayne Flint’s hearing—she checks the time, calculating how much time must pass until the hearing, and flashes on Dr. Ick, the loathsome Terrance Moody, and on Flint’s wacko mother. What the hell is she—
Reeve stops herself, takes a deep breath. Get a grip!
Maybe she should just go home. Tilly’s family will be leaving soon.… And when Dr. Lerner is back in town, he’ll have everything under control. Besides, he put the kibosh on that investigator, so at least he won’t be talking to Tilly.
“She’s too fragile,” he’d said.
Where else has Reeve heard those words?
Stop it, stop it, stop it!
With no chance of going back to sleep, she tosses off the covers, gets dressed, and heads downstairs, feeling so distracted that she drives away without stopping to get something to eat.
The map is still spread out on the seat beside her. She doesn’t need Emily Ewing’s list, she realizes, because the address she seeks was the first place she marked. She heads west out of town, toward a ridge of snowcapped mountains. Just days ago, the house on Tevis Ranch Road had seemed too remote to try to find, yet now it feels wrong to have checked out the first place that Tilly was imprisoned, but not the second. Besides, what else does she have to do?
While she drives west, Reeve replays a conversation she had with Nick Hudson and Dr. Lerner—when was it? The first day she arrived?
They were in a restaurant, and Hudson had asked, “Do you mind if I bring up something about a similarity between your case and Tilly’s?”
She had stiffened. “Of course not.”
“I was thinking about the way you two were rescued. It was because of a move, in both cases.”
“Right. I thought about that. We were found only because our kidnappers wanted better basements.”
“Just a fluke,” he said. “A random fluke.”
“That troubles you,” Dr. Lerner observed. “Because of the other girls? Because you’re worried about the factor of sheer luck versus police work?”
“That about sums it up.” Hudson frowned. “The thing is, kidnapped girls are rarely held captive. Excuse my saying so, but, statistically, well…” He glanced at Reeve.
“They’re usually killed,” she said blandly. “Tilly was lucky. I was lucky. That’s a given.”
This conversation nags at her while she drives.
Westbound traffic is surprisingly light. She turns left off the highway onto a two-way ribbon of blacktop. It winds into the foothills for several miles, passing lonely houses tucked into untamed lots. With so little traffic, she scarcely bothers to check her rearview mirror.
She’s so preoccupied, she nearly misses the sharp turn onto Tevis Ranch Road. The corner sign is partly obscured by a tall tree, which has an old tire swing hanging from a low branch. A shanty stands a few yards back. She cranks the wheel and the Jeep bumps onto a road so narrow that it’s hard to imagine passing anything wider than a bicycle.
Meanwhile, Reeve keeps worrying about similarities between her captivity and Tilly’s. She has been reflexively linking the two, thinking that Randy Vanderholt and Daryl Wayne Flint were predators cut from the same awful cloth, but that’s flawed logic. Daryl Wayne Flint went shopping for a better basement, but wasn’t Vanderholt forced to move?
The road climbs past rugged hillsides of manzanita bushes, evergreens, and scrub oaks. At last, she spots the “For Sale” sign and turns into the driveway, recalling with a pang Emily Ewing’s remark that the house was already listed, and that it would be a hard sell.
The place looks deserted. The house is a mud-brown color, ugly and squat, with cracked concrete sidewalks and a deep, screened, front porch. No reason to let it creep her out, but it does.
A dog barks somewhere far off, but otherwise it’s so quiet that she wishes she hadn’t come. She can picture the basement without seeing it. The dungeon, as Tilly called it.
She steels herself and proceeds up the front steps. The door to the screened porch has a big, heavy lock on it, the coded kind that real estate agents use.
She puts her face to the screen and breathes in the musty, metallic smell. The place looks dark and empty. As far as she can tell, someone has already gutted the house and hauled the trash away.
Thinking she might repeat her luck with the sliding glass door, Reeve moves around the side of the house, where she lets herself through a gate to get to the back. It’s a neglected, weedy lot with a few broken terra-cotta flowerpots, the remnants of some overly optimistic resident. Only the chain-link fence looks new.
No sliding glass door this time, however; just a solid door painted the color of dried egg yolk. She climbs up on the concrete porch and tries the knob. Locked. She steps off the back porch and freezes as she hears the unmistakable sound of a closing car door.
She holds her breath and listens. Footsteps. She tracks the sound and her muscles tense.
The gate clangs and a huge man in a baseball cap comes around the corner.
They face one another across the lot and she feels her pulse jump. She has no weapon, but checks the distance to the closest terra-cotta fragments and instinctively takes a fighting stance. Her elbows are sharp, her boots are heavy. She summons up the basics of a self-defense class from years ago: eyes, instep, throat, groin.
“Don’t look so scared,” he says, coming toward her.
She checks the fence line and takes a step back, wondering if there’s another gate behind her. “I didn’t hear your car,” she says, stalling.
“Prius. I know, they’re creepy quiet.” He stops. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
He’s as big as a bear. She swallows, shakes her head.
In one motion, he sweeps off his baseball cap, revealing his bald head.
“Oh, shit. Otis Poe.”
He puts the cap back on and makes a face. “Well, nice to see you, too.”
She scowls at him but says nothing.
He puts up his hands and jokes, “Okay, don’t shoot.”
“I was just leaving.”
“Hey, I’m not some big, scary guy, okay?”
“Worse, you’re a reporter.”
“Come on, I’m not so bad. Look, I don’t even have a notepad. No camera, no microphone, nothing.” When she doesn’t respond, he adds, “Listen, this is all off the record, okay? You were never here, I was never here. Deal?”
“Are you following me?”
“Just a coincidence.”
She crosses her arms.
“No, really. I’ve been here … oh, four or five times now.”
“Is that right? How come?”
“I don’t know.” He looks around. “Something I haven’t figured out yet, I guess, something I’m missing. My girlfriend says I’m obsessed.” He gives a sheepish grin.
“Something you’re missing. Like what?”
“I
don’t know. Maybe a link between Tilly and the other two missing girls. You know about them, right?
“Of course.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Has Tilly said anything about them?”
She scoffs. “Would I tell you if she had?”
“People tell me things you wouldn’t believe.”
“Yeah. Like my name.”
He gives an apologetic shrug. “Somebody posted it on my blog.”
“I put a lot of effort into avoiding the media, you know.”
“Hey, I’m sorry. But Tilly’s news, so you’re news.”
“You didn’t have to splash my photo all over the paper.”
“My editor did that,” he says, opening his palms. “That’s the newspaper business. Anyway, I’m sorry.”
“Of course you are,” she says with heavy sarcasm.
“Listen, I get it. You said you want to ‘disappear,’” he says, making quote marks in the air, “so I assume there’s no chance of getting an interview.”
She puts her hands on her hips and gives him a sour look.
“Okay, well, just so you know, I think it’s great that you’re helping Tilly Cavanaugh. Who better than you, right?”
They study one another in silence. Finally, he says, “Listen, let me make it up to you. You like to avoid the press, guard your privacy, right?” He takes a step toward her, taking off his navy-blue baseball cap, and holds it out to her. “I think you need this, you know, to cover up your hair.”
She blinks at the cap, recognizing it as a peace offering, wondering if an alliance with Otis Poe might be of use. After a beat, she takes a step forward, accepts the cap, and holds it with both hands. “So, am I supposed to trust you?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at him.
He crosses his heart. “Trustworthy, that’s me.”
“So I can be honest with you? And you’ll be honest with me?”
“My middle name is Abraham. Honest Abe. No kidding.”
“Then the truth is,” she says, handing the cap back to him, “this is a really ugly hat, Otis. Take my word for it, you look better without it.”
He accepts the cap awkwardly, folds it, and jams it into his back pocket, saying, “Well, since we’re both here, do you want to look around? I know how to get inside.”
