So when he asks me if I want to go fishing I say, “Yes, sir,” and try for a smile. He nods, happy, and says, “That’s just swell.”
He laces up my boots and we set off, my wrist secured to his, weaving through the towering pines, between narrow openings, up and down the undulating terrain. All around there’s the shriek of unseen birds, the shuffle of hurried, retreating steps. The vastness of the place is overwhelming. I know that if I was to zoom out, then zoom out again, we would be nothing, mere arthropods in the undergrowth. I want to reach out and touch everything—the bark, the soil, the sticky pungent sap. Scrape the ground until I fill my fingernails. Roll the fallen leaves against my cheeks. I glimpse myself as I was meant to be—the trekker, fresh-faced and eager, at one with nature.
“Turn left here.”
We go into deeper, thicker woods, and I begin to worry I’ve miscalculated his intentions and I’m actually walking to my death. We carry on and follow a path between the trees and I keep my eyes out for landmarks, any sign of a road that I can return to later, but it all looks the same.
He takes me past thickets, up to a ridge, then we circle back down to emerge on the other side to face a lake as smooth as glass.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he says, laying the fishing rod on the ground.
I can’t deny it. It’s more than beautiful. The picture book lake is bordered with elegant maples dripping fall-ripened leaves into the water. Water lilies float in clusters on top. But the most spectacular thing is the water itself—it is the most dazzling shade of crystal blue I have ever seen.
“There’s a spring down there. If you dive deep enough you can actually feel it bubble up from the rock bed aquifers.”
After leading me to the riverbank, he undoes the wrist tie, rolls out a blanket, and sits me down. He slips out of his jacket and hangs it on the hook of a tree branch. There’s a gun tucked in the back of his belt. He turns to me.
“Ever fish?” he says.
I shake my head. “No, sir, I haven’t.”
“You’re in for a treat then. How about it? What to give it a try? Say yes.”
He’s playing with me. I can see his eyes dancing.
I nod. “Sure. Thanks.”
He puts the rod in my hands. I think hard about how I can use it as a weapon but decide to stick with my original plan of befriending him. He circles me and I avoid cringing when his body engulfs mine. He clamps his hands on my wrists and swings the line back and forth in powerful strokes, the stones of his biceps flexing against my arms.
The bright red feather lure lands in the center of the lake.
“Oh, you’re good at this, Amelia,” he says.
I think of his son, Noah, and wonder if he ever stood where I am standing, with his father’s voice in his ear, telling him what a great job he was doing.
I hold the rod on my own, the line ballooning in the breeze, that gaudy red feather lure so out of place among the rest of the surroundings. Moonboot crouches to wash his face in the water, lifts his cap, and runs some over his head. He stands and looks out at the lake.
“This is what the world needs to get back to, Amelia,” he says, “simplicity. Taking only what you need. No commercial production. No profit-driven culture. Think how much happier the world would be without Wall Street and multi-national corporations and bankers and lawyers. I feel nothing but pity for those people. They’ll never experience real happiness, not like this. Feeling the wind on their faces, the earth between their fingers, tasting meat caught with their own hands. But you know what I’m talking about. You were part of it. All of that lust.”
“I wasn’t,” I say it before I can stop myself.
“No? You sure? You didn’t want a pair of those Jimmy Choos whats-its? I bet you pressed your nose against that polished glass and imagined slipping your pretty toes into that soft baby calf leather to send a signal to the world that Amelia Kellaway had finally made it.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
And he didn’t because for me it was never about the money or status or accumulating meaningless material things. For me it was about accomplishment, proving myself, quelling that corrosive sense of not being quite good enough.
Moonboot stares at me. “You’re right, Amelia. I apologize. You’re not like them. I know that. That’s why I chose you.”
I shudder but try to rise above it and remind myself that I’m supposed to be gaining his trust.
“Do you mind if I ask your name?” I say.
He looks at me for a long time and does the thing when he lifts his forefinger to rub the spot just above his top lip.
“It’s okay, forget I asked, it’s none of my business.” I say.
“Rex.”
It’s his real name, I just know it, and I feel violently ill. Why couldn’t he have just made something up? Not only do I know his face, but now also his name, and he doesn’t seem to give a hoot. Don’t go down that road, I tell myself. Keep him talking. Get him to let down his guard.
“What do you do for a living, Rex?”
“Chatterbox today, aren’t we?” He pauses. “Take a guess, Amelia. What do you think? Doctor? Lawyer? Candlestick maker?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see you in an office. You work on the land?”
He seems pleased with my answer. “In a manner of speaking,” he says, but before he can elaborate he shouts and points at the water. “You got a bite!”
A sudden tug on the line. Then another. The rod bends so much that I think it will snap.
“Pull back,” says Rex. “Gently now, Amelia. You want to snag him, make sure that hook gets good and stuck in his cheek before reeling in.”
The water ripples in circles and the line is so taut I’m sure it has snagged a rock. The line jolts again.
“That’s it, Amelia. Bring it up. Slowly, now. Slowly.”
The fish is fighting. The reel is whirring.
“Wind it, quickly, that’s it.”
The fish breaks the surface and dances on its tail. I reel furiously and bring the fish in to the riverbank. Rex unhooks the flapping creature and lays it on the plastic bag.
“I did it,” I say, exhilarated. “I really caught a fish.”
*
He roasts the brown trout in foil over the fire. He allows me the first bite, flaking off the milky white flesh into my bowl. It tastes good and fresh and real. Not like the thrice-crumbed grocery store fish that has been minced with God knows what else and shaped to look like a fish. We eat until there’s nothing left except a wide-toothed comb.
“I’ll wash up, Amelia,” he says. “It’s only fair.”
He tosses the bones into the flames and scrapes and washes the plates. When he’s done he sits down and stares at the fire.
“I’m going to let you go,” he says. I look at him to see if he’s joking. “Take you back so you can carry on with whatever you were going to do.”
“Now?”
He lifts his eyes to the forest.
“It’s too close to nightfall. Tomorrow.”
14
I sleep in fits and starts. Is he playing me? Stringing me along in some twisted mind game? The desperate part of me wants fiercely to believe that I have managed to humanize myself enough for him to release me. It happens, doesn’t it? There are entire true-crime series made about survivors of terrible crime who live to tell the tale. Yes, I say inwardly, that’s it. Think positive. Send out those optimistic vibrations to the universe—believe it and it will manifest.
By first light I’m fully awake but he’s still asleep beside me. I wait, watching his passive face inches from my own, and tell myself this is the last time I will be tethered. Tonight I will be sleeping in a bed, an actual bed, on my own.
He stirs and opens his eyes.
“Morning,” I say an octave higher than usual.
He blinks at me and says nothing and for one horrible moment I think he’s going to rape me again. I mean, why wouldn’t he? Once hardly makes the trip
worthwhile, does it? He knows I won’t resist, that I won’t risk him not letting me go. But he breaks off eye contact and sits up.
“I don’t know about you, Amelia, but I need coffee,” he says, clapping his big hands together.
I nod. “Yes, coffee would be good.”
As usual, coffee is followed by porridge and him washing the dishes and putting them away. When he’s done, he turns to me.
“Let’s get you cleaned up before we hit the road.”
I want to tell him I don’t need a bath. I can live with myself. Even though I stink worse than week-old trash. But it’s a good sign. He probably just wants to get rid of any trace of his DNA on my body before he lets me go.
We take the hour-long hike to the lake and once there, he digs inside his duffel bag, hands me soap, and points to the water.
“In you go. I won’t look. I’ll sit right over here.”
He does what he says and settles down on a log, facing the opposite direction. Quickly I undress and dip into the water, which is breathtakingly cold but fresh. I put my head under, wet my hair, scrub my face.
“Finish up now, Amelia,” I hear him call. “There’s clean clothes in the bag.”
I splash soap from my face and check that his back is turned then hurry from the water naked. Inside the bag I find a fluffy white towel and a brand new summer dress made from expensive cloth. It’s embossed with exquisite daisies and comes complete with a $150 price tag. It’s chilling, I think, the extent to which he has thought this through—the moonboot, the tire, the camp in the woods, the dress meant for his perfect size four victim. Trying not to think too hard about it, I slip the thing over my head, and when I go to remove the tag, I see that it’s secured with a tiny safety pin. Something tells me to hold on to it, so I do, attaching it to the underside of my hem where it can’t be seen.
“Put your old clothes in the bag when you’re done.”
I comply and stuff my fancy high-priced trekking gear into the bag and tell him I’m finished.
He turns around and nods his approval.
“Suits you,” he says, walking over.
He fills the duffel bag with rocks and tosses it into the lake.
“Let’s go.”
But “let’s go” doesn’t mean let’s go back to civilization and the gas station where this entire sorry mess started, it means let’s go back to camp so he can work on his car for the next three hours while I sit holding my breath. It means checking and filing every one of the Capri’s four spark plugs, disconnecting and removing the battery so he can examine, clean, and oil the carburetor and four other critical parts. It means getting on the ground and sliding on his back under the chassis to adjust the front and rear axles and check the tread on the tires and an apparent hole in the muffler.
I tell myself to be patient, that there’s still time to leave before nightfall, that he’s just making sure the car can handle the journey back into town. But morning light changes to afternoon light then to dusk. Finally he stops what he’s doing and closes the hood and throws me a tin of spam.
“Eat that.”
He turns away and soaks a rag in turpentine, uses it to wipe grease from his hands. I think to myself, okay, this is better, something to eat and we’ll get going. I peel open the can and eat. Rex is lingering over by the tarp lean-to drinking a bottle of water.
“Aren’t you going to have any?” I say.
He shakes his head. “I’m good.”
“Is the car fixed now? Are we going soon?” I say, between mouthfuls.
He doesn’t answer and heads for the box of supplies instead. He pulls out the longhead matches and fire starters.
I put down my can of Spam. “What are you doing? We don’t need a fire. We’ve got to get going.”
He won’t look at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Tomorrow,” he says, without lifting his eyes.
He criss-crosses the kindling and places three fire starter cubes on top.
“Tomorrow? What do you mean tomorrow? You said we would go today.”
He strikes a longhead match and ignites the fire starters.
I get to my feet.
“Sit down,” he says.
“We’re leaving today,” I stammer. “Now.”
He doesn’t move.
“You said we would.”
“Sit down, Amelia.”
I am shaking with anger. “You need to let me go.”
“I said tomorrow.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
“Suit yourself.”
“You were never going to let me go.” I bunch my fists. “You’re a liar.”
“Sticks and stones, Amelia.”
I move closer.
“You belong in an institution,” I say.
He tosses four logs onto the fire. “Probably.”
“No wonder you’re all alone.”
“That’s quite a tongue you’ve got there,” he says.
“No wonder your wife won’t let you see your son. Do you even have a son? Or did you just make that up?”
“Of course I do.”
“He probably hates you.”
Rex lunges for me. “Hush now! I don’t want to hear another word out of that nasty mouth.” He shakes me hard. “Is that clear, Amelia? We go when I say we go.”
He pushes me to the ground and stomps off to the edge of the camp, stands there with his back turned, hands on his hips.
“You can’t keep me out here forever,” I say, finally.
He looks over his shoulder at me. “That’s exactly what I intend to do.”
15
When I was eleven, I found a dead cat in the bushes behind the apartment complex we moved to after my father left. The poor thing had snagged its collar on a nail near the top of the fence and hanged itself. I ran inside to tell my mother and she hugged me and told me it was all right to be sad.
She was going to put the stiff little corpse out in the trash but I insisted we bury it in a shoebox under a holly bush. For weeks after, I would go there and lie on my back on the grass and talk to the holly bush cat. I would tell it about my day, the test I aced, how Nathan Krabbe put gum in my hair, and how Daisy Walker, my apparent best friend, dumped me for Kathy Carter because Kathy had a pair of Doc Martens leather boots and I didn’t. Then one day a work crew arrived and began removing the holly bush and shredding the surrounding trees and laying asphalt. I watched powerless as a giant roller pressed the steaming tarmac into place, and the guy in the Construction Worx T-shirt painted out a parking grid with a little machine on wheels right over the spot where the holly bush cat lay.
I turn on my side and think of the cat and how its owner never knew what happened to it. I think of my mother and her little barky lapdog, Jed, and how she will never know what happened to me.
I feel like an idiot for believing him. Like a susceptible pensioner lured into a Nigerian scam. Matthew always said I was too trusting.
Rex has barely spoken a word in the two days since he refused to take me back. He performs his daily tasks in a perfunctory, distant manner, furrow chiseled into his brow—wake up, remove the zip ties, make coffee, eat breakfast, clean camp, do not engage with the prisoner. In the afternoon, he might collect and chop firewood, venture out to lay some animal traps, take care of the latrine, but there was no talking to me.
I watch all this from the sidelines, where I have withdrawn into my shell, lost in a deep depression I can’t fight my way out of. The days seem long and gray and hopeless. The only bright thing is the leaves from the maples and aspens which seemed to have turned red and gold overnight.
This afternoon he returns to camp with two dead raccoons swinging from a length of twine. He’s brighter than usual and announces that tonight there will be stew. He plants himself on an upturned bucket and deftly skins, guts, and dismembers one of the unfortunate creatures, placing the parts in the saucepan, adding water, and simmering it over a low heat. He strings up the othe
r raccoon on a branch near me and leaves it there, and those unblinking black eyes fix on me in a thousand-yard stare.
Somewhere close to dusk, the stew is ready. He gives me a plateful and takes one for himself, and digs in heartily. I have no appetite and I pick at mine, hoping he won’t notice.
“Something wrong with your meal, Amelia?”
“No.”
I try harder and close my eyes and imagine my mother’s Sunday roast and manage to finish the plate. Once dinner is over, he turns to me and places both hands on his thighs.
“Ready?” he says.
By this he means toilet. He’s religious about taking me to the latrine four times a day on a very precise schedule—7 a.m., 11 a.m., 3 p.m., 7 p.m. Like a pet in a kennel, I have learned to go on command.
He leads me across the campsite to the pit, which is remarkably odor free even though we have been using it for days. He has some sort of system in place, where he covers it a little after every use with a mixture of dirt and lime.
He does his usual back-turning thing and I crouch and notice the cool metal of the safety pin brush against my thigh. An idea comes to me. Secretly I unclip the pin and pierce my thigh and smear blood on my fingers.
“I’ve got my period.”
He turns around. “What do you mean?”
“I’m menstruating.” I show him my bloody hand. “Do you have anything?”
By the look on his face, it’s clear he hasn’t thought this far ahead.
“Tampons? Sanitary pads?” I say.
He shakes his head and for the first time he looks unsure of himself. “No.”
“A cloth then?”
“Of course, Amelia. I’ll find something. Wait here.”
He heads for the car and disappears behind the tree line.
Now’s my chance. A minute at the most to put as much distance between him and me before he realizes I’m gone. I scan the forest. Which way should I go? It all looks the same. It doesn’t matter. Go. Go now before he comes back.
I choose left and dash for the trees, my legs rubber with adrenaline, my bare feet quickly shredded to bits.
Left for Dead: A gripping psychological thriller Page 4
