After completing the examination, I plunk down on the dirt floor, hug my knees up under my chin, and contemplate the horror of my discovery. Gabriel didn’t dump all of his victims in the deserted parking lots of stores. One of them is here with me.
After a few slow, deep breaths I grab the bottle of water off the shelf where I placed it earlier and chug down the rest, then rev up my courage and prepare to touch her again.
What the hell did Gabriel do to her and what will he do to me? I finger the cuffs around my ankles but fail to discover any way to loosen them. Battling horror and maybe even worse, discouragement, I stand back up, find the dead woman on the shelf again, and using both hands, I move on, hoping the room will give up more of its secrets. And hoping those secrets won’t be so horrifying that they’ll render me completely dysfunctional.
Moments later, things get worse. Ten inches away from her toes lies the skeleton of a child. It couldn’t have been more than four or five years old at the time of death. This doesn’t fit the killer’s profile at all. If he wanted to kill children, he would have murdered Brittany, Shane, Matthew Phelps, and me. What the hell is this poor kid doing down here?
For one scary minute I feel like I might be losing my mind, something that could easily happen if I’m kept imprisoned here for very long with no light and no sound.
“Shit,” I say out loud. “I’m trapped inside an Edgar Allan Poe story.”
I’ve always preferred his poetry to his stories, for reasons that are quickly growing more obvious as the silent minutes tick by in this gruesome place. Where it’s always midnight on a moonless and starless night. The tenuous grip I had on my sanity weakens and, in a hoarse monotone, I begin whispering into the darkness, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary . . .”
I get as far as my favorite line: “And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”
Then I skip ahead, because I can’t remember every word of Poe’s lengthy masterpiece. Soon I arrive at “the night’s Plutonian shore.” And start thinking about Pluto, the Roman god of the Underworld: the king of Hell. In my imagination, instead of the large, beastly-looking devilish creature I used to picture, he looks like Gabriel Stone. Muscular, compact, and perfectly built. Incredibly handsome, with a golden tan to show off the shiny white smile that never reaches his arctic eyes. No horns, no tail, but even more terrifying because his appearance allows him to walk among us ordinary mortals undetected.
And now he has me, walled up alive with no chance of escape. “Nevermore” will I see the sky, the grass, the trees, or the people I love. To avoid hysteria, I send this horrifying idea plummeting down a chute and into the deepest, darkest places in my mind, where hopefully it will stay buried beneath less desperate thoughts.
I move on to A Dream within a Dream, and after that I recite a couple of the many verses of The Bells. When I run out of Poe, I can’t avoid thinking about “the darkest evening of the year.” I love obnoxiously singsong poetry, so of course I can remember every word of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, along with a few other poems by Robert Frost. If “two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” I’m definitely stuck at the very end of the stupid-ass less traveled one. No hope of anybody finding me here, trapped in Gabriel’s dark, silent underworld, where it’s always blacker than the dreariest midnight imaginable.
After my Poe and Frost repertoires, I pause again, and search my mind for other works of great literature. Thanks to some of the Eastfield Public School system’s old-school teachers and my own geeky love for reading, I have plenty of memorized material to use in order to keep boredom at bay and prevent myself from going bat-shit crazy.
I was one of those kids who opens a book and instantly knows. My elementary school teachers called me an organic reader. I started out reading every line of print I could find. The warnings on household cleaners, the ingredients on shampoo bottles, the directions for how to use everything in our house. Lather, rinse, repeat. If swallowed, call poison control immediately. This product contains 30 percent of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C. Not suitable for children under three years old. Use in a well-ventilated area. Literacy wasn’t second nature to me. It was my first nature.
And it still is. I read everything: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, magazine articles, and one-thousand-page novels with equally gargantuan sequels and prequels. I devour each page at the speed of light. Reading is both my escape from the world and the key to my understanding of it. My logic, my reality, and my chaos. My sanity and my insanity. I breathe in someone else’s words and breathe out my own ideas and dreams. I would not be who I am today without books.
I’m able to defend my sanity with armies of phrases written by the best authors on the planet. What kept their extraordinary minds anchored in an ordinary world? Scrawling their brilliant words onto page after page after page. Some of their works I know by heart, others only by the images that exploded into my consciousness as I read their words. Boom. Straight from their minds to mine. Scene after scene after scene. And I’ll remember them all forever—miraculous and life saving under these horrific conditions, because if I don’t stay rational and focused, I’m doomed. I’ll never get away from him. For now, to keep from falling into the abyss, I travel as far from Gabriel as I can, using my imagination and Shakespeare’s. After reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy and Portia’s plea for mercy from The Merchant of Venice out loud to myself, followed by some Emily Dickinson and a little e. e. cummings, I give up on literature and turn bravely back to biology.
Running my fingers along the pathetically small skeleton on the shelf, I announce the Latin name for each bone as I touch it. When my hand reaches the clavicle, a key turns inside a lock. Metal slides and rasps against metal, the sound of a padlock slipping off an iron door handle. The door opens and then closes. His footfalls move softly along the narrow passage, heading straight toward me and what’s left of the two people he locked down here decades ago.
A bobbing circle of light travels along the floor in front of him as he approaches. The villain in my life’s story, the god of my underworld, grips a flashlight in his right hand. In his left is a gun, pointed straight at my chest. Vengeance, for now, is not mine. It’s out of the question.
The feeble circle of light is enough to illuminate Gabriel Stone’s face so I can look into his eyes: irises of near colorless and impenetrable crystal, rimmed by narrow gray hoops and dotted with pinpoints of black at the center. Pale-blue ice caves that go on forever. Like mirrors lined up to demonstrate the concept of infinity. Infinite evil. Infinite emptiness. Gabriel is empty, and he’s trying to fill the bottomless void with human bodies. After he kills, he doesn’t feel quite so empty. But the feeling only lasts a short time. Then he has to kill again.
And I’m next. Quickly, I bury my fear under an avalanche of rage. With a stare that I wish could kill him, I dare Gabriel to turn away first. If he wants to try connecting with another human, he can stare into my eyes and see the inferno of hatred that blazes within me. Hatred for the man who killed my mother. Hatred for the man who stole my freedom and locked me in this hellish pit. When he looks into my eyes, I want him to see his own death. I might not be the one to deal him that fatal blow, but I can hope and I can plan and I won’t rest until I’ve finished him off or someone else has.
He speaks first. “I see you’ve found my little brother.”
Realizing my right hand is still resting on the child’s skull, I let it fall to my side.
“I didn’t kill him. She did.” With the flashlight in his right hand, he points toward the adult skeleton. He keeps the barrel of the pistol aimed steadily at my heart.
“When I saw what my mother had done to Michael, I choked the life out of her with my bare hands.”
I think about rushing him and making a grab for the gun. Hard to rush someone, though, when your feet are tied together.
“Don’t worry, angel face. I won’t come any closer. It would be difficul
t for you to kick me in the jaw again with the zip ties around your ankles. But I don’t trust your fists, either.” He strokes the left side of his face and smiles.
I remain silent and continue to throw daggers of hatred at him with my eyes.
“Not in the mood to talk? Okay then. I’ll see you tomorrow. Maybe you’ll feel like having a cozy little chat then. Maybe you’ll grow tired of their company and look forward to mine.” He waves the flashlight toward the bones and then swings it up under his chin: an old ghost-story-around-the-campfire trick. Old, but still effective. Creepy as hell.
He laughs, lowers the flashlight, and backs his way out of the manmade cave, pointing the gun at me until he’s out of sight. The door opens and then closes behind him, and the padlock rasps back into place. I’m alone again, and the manmade cave is silent except for the frantic sound of my wild, imprisoned heart pounding uselessly against my ribcage.
I refuse to cry out. Only Gabriel would hear me, anyway, and I don’t want to show him my fear. I don’t want him to feel satisfied or successful or in control. Because he isn’t. He’ll never control my thoughts.
After I calm down, I ask myself some important questions. The first one: What can I do to keep my body strong? Answering my own question, I sit down on the floor and do about a hundred sit-ups. Then I turn over and do as many pushups as I can. Good start. The answer to that question was easy. The next one’s harder. What can I do to keep my mind strong? My will to survive needs to be as sturdy as these thick cement walls. I need a careful and organized plan that will guarantee my escape and the patience to wait for exactly the right moment to try it.
As each second passes, the solitude and impending boredom grow worse than the darkness and the silence. After what seems like ages, I’m not sure if a few minutes have gone by or a few hours. I move away from my only companions, the Stone family skeletons, and sit down on the dirt floor again. I focus inward, searching for the deepest emotions I’ve ever felt and find my mother. I don’t remember anything I haven’t learned from looking at photographs or listening to stories, but I imagine how I must’ve felt when I was with her. And suddenly she’s here. I know how it feels to have a mother, my mother. She’s inside me and all around me and I feel loved and I have hope. I had precious little time to get to know her when she was alive, but I have a lot of time now, sitting here in the room where she died. I have all night at the very least.
In the loneliest part of me, I picture her face, and I’m not alone anymore. She’s with me. One hundred percent. And I know she wishes she could shove my arms into a jacket right now because it’s cold as a bitch down here.
She smiles that smile that my father told me could dry anyone’s tears and reaches toward me with one hand. In that hand is a closed book, an old, much-handled, much-loved paperback. One I read recently when I learned it was her favorite. Sophomore year in high school I read it for the first time, and then I read it again when my dad explained that I’d been named for its author. To Kill a Mockingbird. In the otherworldly illumination of my mother’s presence, I open to the first page, and inside my mind, I begin to read.
By the time I finish the first paragraph, I’m not in the cave anymore and I’m not cold. Instead, I’m standing in a small, lazy, warm Southern town called Maycomb. Scout and Jem Finch arrive first. Followed by Atticus, with his unshakable bravery and wisdom. Soon Boo Radley’s watching over me: saner than any of the people who think he’s crazy. I can’t stop “reading”, but don’t realize what’s compelling my obsession until I get to the part about the trial, the part where Atticus proves that Tom Robinson couldn’t have beat up Mayella Ewell. He points out an irrefutable detail about the defendant, proving Tom’s innocence. And I get a brilliant idea that will help me defeat the enemy and escape from this dungeon. Even though I’m tired, I fight to stay awake, alternately visualizing scenes from the book and plans for my escape. Eventually, I can’t keep my eyes open any longer and drift off to sleep but not before thanking the woman who helped me find light in this terrifying darkness. In the very place where she spent the last few moments of her life.
Chapter 28
Gabriel
The Investigation
Gabriel locked the padlock and grabbed the vibrating cell phone out of his pocket. The caller ID read withheld.
Even though his heart was jittering, he managed to answer in a calm voice. “Hello.”
“Gabriel. Thomas Flagg. He took Harper. We need your help.”
He allowed the panic he was feeling to show in his voice, because it was appropriate. “What do you mean ‘he took Harper’?” Did they actually want his help? With the investigation? Did life get any better than this? He thought not.
“The killer. He took Harper. He kidnapped her right off our front porch early this morning.”
“Holy shit! Are you sure?” Gabriel’s hand shook and he almost dropped his phone.
“Yes, John MacGregor was in the kitchen making a pot of coffee. When he walked into the living room, the front door was ajar and Harper was gone.”
“How could that have happened? In broad daylight? Somebody must’ve seen something!”
“No one saw anything. It happened too fast. I have a couple of security cameras inside the house, but he never stepped inside. One step inside the front door, and we would’ve had him on film.”
“Damn! What about an Amber Alert?”
He hoped his voice sounded shocked and not delighted. Good thing we’re not FaceTiming, Thomas. He bit down on a knuckle and stifled a giggle.
“We can’t issue an Amber Alert because she’s eighteen. Plus, we don’t know the make or model of the vehicle. The local news stations are showing her picture and issuing a description: height, weight, eye, and hair color, what she was wearing. State and local police forces are cruising all over town. Stopping people. Asking questions. The FBI’s doing everything they can. A group of officers from the local PD is canvassing door to door to see if anyone saw anything. There’s a task force organizing volunteers to search some of the more remote areas of Eastfield and Raynwater.”
“I’ll join the volunteers immediately.”
“No, we need you for something else. I’m meeting with Shane and John MacGregor to go over everything that happened sixteen years ago. Maybe we missed something. A detail that seemed insignificant at the time might be the one clue that helps us discover his identity; there could be something the cops overlooked.”
“I’m on my way. Where are you? Your place?” Gabriel headed for the house to grab his keys.
“No. The forensics people are still working there. Meet us at the MacGregors’.”
“I’m in my car already. Text me the address.” Gabriel clicked off his phone and drove out of his driveway at top speed, laughing like someone had just told him the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
He arrived at the MacGregors’ holding a cardboard tray of coffee and carrying a box of donuts. “I don’t usually eat junk food or drink caffeine, but under these circumstances, we can break the rules.” He arranged his face into a mask of concern.
Thomas Flagg sat on the couch with his forearms on his thighs and his bald head in both hands. He didn’t look up when Gabriel placed the coffee and donuts on the low table in front of him.
“Thomas, I’m so sorry.” He placed a hand on Flagg’s shoulder. Harper’s father lifted his head and stared at the food as if he didn’t know what it was.
“He kills them within an hour of abducting them. If he sticks to his MO, she’s already dead.”
Gabriel patted his arm then took his hand away. “We can’t think like that. Maybe this time’s different. She was taken from her own home, not a parking lot. In the morning. No kid in the car seat. Completely different scenario. We need to believe she’s still alive, Thomas. Harper’s a fighter. She’s already proven it once. We’ll get her back.”
Flagg lowered his head back onto his hands.
Shane MacGregor walked over to the window and gazed out, as if h
e expected Harper to run up to the front door and knock on it.
The killer began to pass around the donut box. Shane declined with a polite wave of his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Stone, but I’m not hungry.”
Gabriel put the donuts down on the table and placed a fatherly hand on his shoulder—right above the scar he had carved into the kid’s arm. “Try to stay focused, buddy. We’re no good to Harper if we fall apart.”
Detective Flagg spoke up. “Gabriel’s right. Let’s start at the beginning and proceed in chronological order. I’ll go first, because my wife was the first known victim.”
Everyone sat down, and Thomas began going over the events that had happened on the day Rosemary Flagg was taken from a grocery-store parking lot sixteen years ago.
Next, Gabriel related the details of his own story about what had happened on the night his wife had been abducted and murdered. Their tales were practically identical.
A few moments of silence elapsed before John MacGregor stood up, sucked in a big mouthful of coffee, swallowed it, and then began.
“I’m sorry, Thomas, but I’ve been withholding information for sixteen years. I chose to hide details about our family life that might’ve helped the experts come up with a better psychological profile of the killer.”
Shane looked at his father. The other two men edged forward on their seats and waited for MacGregor to continue.
He paced around the room as he spoke. “I wanted to protect my family’s privacy, but if it might help Harper, privacy be damned!”
“What is it, John?” Gabriel tried to sound caring and patient.
Hidden in the Dark (Harper Flagg Book 1) Page 19
