Hope began to simmer inside a part of my brain that had all but shut down since the kidnapping. I tried to trample it down. Hope was all well and good, but false hope could prove fatal to my mental game. I wanted to avoid the fierce disappointment that would come if I let myself believe that I knew where I was and it turned out that I was wrong.
If I gave it a couple months, the people would come. When people started migrating in and began to launch their boats, I’d know for sure. I’d grown up in that small marina. I knew the people, and I knew their boats. If I was right, we were only a few miles away. Friends and family would be riding by, eventually.
Plus, there was a party cruiser that would begin going by. People rented out the boat from upriver and went for a booze cruise nearly every weekend in the summer. They played loud music, yelled and laughed obnoxiously, and made a public spectacle of themselves. I’d recognize that damn boat anywhere.
I shifted my eyes around and let my gaze fall upon a great blue heron fishing for his dinner. That just encouraged me all the more. Those birds loved the Chesapeake Bay. I knew the bay was big, and I could be anywhere along it or near it, but damn…
The glimmer of a plan began to bloom. What if I managed to get porch privileges more often? What if someone I knew drove by on their boat? What if I simply made myself visible to them and they spotted me? They would drive by again, they would call someone. Or they would come back with guns of their own and bust me the hell out. And I guarantee you, if my father and uncles came by and spotted me, buddy boy at the grill would have no chance of survival.
The hope, it began to burn. My heart raced, my hands trembled, and I shot a look of pure determination at his back. It had just become all the more imperative that I play the role I was told to believe was my new reality.
I enjoyed my dinner, I mean truly enjoyed my dinner, for the first time in months. I was outside, along the river, in my element, and I was damn near peaceful with my preliminary plan. Even if I was wrong and I wasn’t where I thought I was, I knew enough about life along a river to know how to find help when the time came. For once, I was convinced there was a light at the end of this bleak tunnel.
Chapter Four
One Step Closer to the Loony Bin
Oh, good Lord.
Asshole had just come through the door, gave me a sly smile, and pulled a wrapped gift from his inside jacket pocket. He then ushered me over to the couch, sat me down, and placed the present in my lap. And then, to my wide-eyed surprise, he laid it on me… And I kid you not, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to laugh in his face, punch him in the throat, or vomit in his lap.
“Mia,” he started, as though he were about to make a grand gesture of devotion.
Don’t roll your eyes, don’t roll your eyes, don’t roll your eyes.
“You know I’ve been infatuated with you since the first day I laid eyes on you.”
Smile. No, don’t freaking roll your eyes! Fight the urge.
“That infatuation has grown in the months we’ve spent together. I’m so happy to have you in my life. I love you.” And then he stopped talking and looked at me expectantly.
Just say the words. Open your mouth and just spit them out, cross your toes if it makes you feel better… “Ah…” I choked out before the words got stuck in my throat. …Oh, come on! Say the words. Fake it ‘til you make it, baby. Keep luring him in. “I… I love you, too.” Just like I would love a good bout of the plague.
He released a breath and smiled more enthusiastically. “Good. Now open your gift.”
I pulled the carefully tied ribbon and peeled back the wrapping. I lifted open the thin box and stared in dismay at the contents.
My brain didn’t understand how to process what it was seeing. My thoughts were sputtering and the wheels were working in overdrive, fighting against what a present like this could signify.
It was a pink newborn outfit.
No, no, no. I glanced up at him and saw a twinkle in his eye. No, no, no, no, no, my mind began to chant.
“I’ve been thinking,” he claimed, “that the only thing that could make our lives more perfect is for us to have a baby.”
My mouth dropped open and my breaths began to come out in pants. Oh, fuck, no. I don’t want you impregnating me, you bastard. Every time that nut job touched me, I happily celebrated the knowledge of my implanted birth control. I had no intention of stopping that particular party now.
“You look panicked, Mia.”
Well, duh, you freak of nature. My gaze darted from place to place around the room as I tried to form enough coherent reasons to use to try and talk him out of this idea. “I am panicked… I don’t know what to do with a baby!” Liar, liar, pants on fire. I had younger cousins. Over the years, I’d changed some of their diapers and fed them their baby food before going to school in the morning. Grandma had always been the family babysitter, so my cousins had been frequent playmates.
But, he looked like he was buying the lie, so I kept going. “What if I drop it? Those things are slippery and wiggly when they’re wet, aren’t they?”
“You can learn as you go. Your instincts will kick in when you need them.”
Oh, really? Where the hell are my survival instincts that would tell me how to get the hell out of here and get you into a nice, cold jail cell?
“Can I ask you something and not have you take it as a criticism, because I’m honestly curious? And, please, keep in mind this whole topic scares me.”
He drew his back up straight, and his entire manner shifted to a more proprietary stature. “Go ahead.”
“I’ve been nursing a cavity in a back molar because you are opposed to taking me to a dentist. How am I going to obtain prenatal care?”
“Mia,” he began in a condescending tone, “women have been having babies for millennia without medical care. It’s a natural thing.”
“Women have died giving birth for just as long. Is that a risk you really want me to take?”
He cocked the eyebrow at me.
I put my hand up in a conciliatory gesture. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to question you. It’s just that, I know I would never want to risk losing you. We’ve put an immense amount of work into this relationship. I’d hate to think of your having to start all over again, with someone else, if something happened to me.” There, hopefully that gave him something to think about.
He stared at me for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps you’re right. But we still have that extra bedroom upstairs.”
“Well, we could use an extra room for a lot of different things, at least for a while.”
“True, but still… What if we adopt a child, maybe about a year or so old? He or she would be at an age that you’d be more comfortable caring for.”
I tried to appear as though I was actually contemplating this with him. “Adoption agencies wouldn’t -”
“They wouldn’t understand our particular arrangement. Besides, I don’t want anyone digging into our business. My dear Mia, there are plenty of children out there who aren’t being properly taken care of. Parents who deserve to lose their child.” His eyes met mine and all but dripped with sincerity, “We could rescue a toddler, just like I rescued you.”
Oh, my God in Heaven, NO! He was talking about kidnapping another kid, for me.
He had convinced himself that he rescued me from living a neglected life. At first I had thought that he was trying to brainwash me, and maybe it had started out that way. But I now lived under the impression that he truly believes it, despite however many times I’ve told him that it wasn’t true.
I openly rubbed my temples in front of him in the hopes that if I displayed enough stress, he might change his mind on the baby situation for the foreseeable future. “How are you going to know that the baby is being neglected? You got lucky with me. I could have come from a happy family.”
He leveled a look at me that suggested it was taking an effort to maintain his patience. “Your father left you sitting on a curb, all by your
self. I knew right away that you were abused. Otherwise, your father would never have been late to pick you up. No responsible parent leaves his child alongside the road, for anyone to grab.”
And then he stared at me, daring me to challenge him.
What the hell kind of parents raised you?
I wasn’t about to attempt to correct his misconceptions about that, yet again. I was beyond the point of being willing to risk one of his punishments to try and convince him that what he’d done to me was wrong.
And for the record, I was seventeen at the time, not seven. And my dad was not running late. My car had broken down and was in the garage. Dad was going to pick me up after work to take me to the garage to so I could pay for my fixed car. But with our conflicting work schedules, I had needed to wait an hour for him to finish his shift to come and get me.
Instead of staying inside the building while I waited for him, I’d wanted to sit outside and enjoy the sunshine. I had seen Asshole’s car circling the block a couple times, and I had grown suspicious of it. But did I get up and go back inside? Oh, no, not me. I just continued to sit there, thinking I was perfectly safe and that nothing would ever happen to me.
“If we get a one-year-old, then we’re going to have to share our time and attention with that child. Do you really want to share me with someone else? How badly do you want a child?”
He seemed to tone down the intensity of his expression. No doubt because I phrased it so as to ask about what he wanted, denoting that I thought his desires were more important to me than my own. “I thought you would want a baby, so you wouldn’t have to continue to spend the days by yourself.”
I dared to lift my eyebrow at him, “I know you do not enjoy taking my age into consideration-”
“You are an adult now,” he interrupted with an air of finality.
I took a breath and met his eyes, “I know, but I’m still only eighteen. While I understand that I’m physically capable of having children, I’m not in any hurry. My biological clock is in no danger of audibly ticking any time soon. If your biological clock is ticking, that’s one thing. But if it’s not, I would prefer to wait until I actually feel the need to be responsible for another human life.”
“If you simply are not ready to expand our family, then we’ll wait. I just thought you might enjoy some additional companionship.”
“Couldn’t we start with a dog, or a cat, or a… fish, or something?”
He nodded, “Perhaps.”
“Maybe an animal from a rescue,” I suggested. “A lot of those places kill the animals after they stay there for a certain amount of time. If we get an animal from there, we may literally be saving its life. They’d make sure the animal was healthy and up to date on its shots and such.” - Lest he think about becoming a dognapper.
“I’ll consider a pet.”
Geez, Louise. He’d actually been talking about applying the web of deceptions he’s woven around me into an excuse to steal another child.
This is why I couldn’t just run. I might get away, especially if I am where I think I am. After all, I knew about a dozen places I could go to and hide, once I floated downriver. But if I did that, he would get away and he would strike again. And whoever he steals next would be my replacement, and therefore my fault. Maybe not legally, but in my own head, I’ll always blame myself because he wasn’t caught and convicted for my disappearance. I didn’t know if I was his first victim or not. But I did know that if there was another girl out there who had been his victim, and had somehow gotten away without a care as to getting him caught, there was a part of me that wanted to punch that bitch in the face.
I wasn’t proud of that part of myself, but it was there all the same.
Chapter Five
The Litmus Test
If the trees were any indication, spring was now in full bloom. And since the weather had gotten so much nicer, we’d been eating our dinners out on the porch more often than not.
Sometimes when he was home during the weekend, and he was occupied with something downstairs, he’d leave the door slid open, indicating that I was allowed to head out on my own. This was huge. This meant that he was on a slow moving path towards what he had promised.
He’d told me that his true intention was to treat me as his wife, a real wife. He would eventually like for me to have a car to run errands, to take trips with me, and to let me come and go as I pleased. When he’d originally told me all of this, I thought he was either teasing me or that he’d just completely lost his mind. But he’d sworn over and over that it was up to me whether or not that would ever happen. He had to be able to trust me. His trust would be contingent upon my acceptance of him, my obedience, and my attitude towards our life together.
That open door was the first measurable proof that he was moving in the direction of fulfilling his promises. I had been also allowed more and more latitude in expressing my opinions, as long as I still phrased it in such a way so as to indicate that his opinion and needs mattered more than my own. My actual wants and needs were beginning to be taken into account, as opposed to his idea of the wants and needs he thought I should have. He had begun to treat me as a person.
In short, he seemed to actually believe that his mastermind plan was working. I don’t know what had ever happened in his life to make him think that this would work. But regardless of the cause of his reasoning, I had officially determined that the asshole was indeed insane. But it was a dependable, rational kind of insanity. I could work with that.
Even if I never devised a plan to escape and get him caught, eventually he’d let me out of the house. Sure he’d have the car LoJacked, but in a town that I have previous knowledge of, I could totally get away, eventually. I just hoped that it didn’t take me another year to do it.
Tonight I was planning a little test of my new found freedom. The result would depend upon the way I handled my fabricated excuse for breaking his silently implied new rules. It’s true that I was going to risk a punishment, but I had to know if he was really relaxing his stance on the necessity of the hostage situation.
After dinner, he’d gone up to his lair. He claimed that there was something that he had to do for work. Since I wasn’t fully aware of exactly what all his job in technology entailed, I didn’t know whether or not he was telling the truth. Who really knew what all a predator did while in his private sanctum?
I’d been waiting for a good excuse. Something that he’d believe would draw me out. And right now, the sunset was freaking gorgeous. The sparse layers of clouds on the horizon were a kaleidoscope of yellow, orange, and red around the sun. And pink and purple on clouds further out. What’s more, the sunlight was shimmering off the surface of the water. It definitely painted a scene powerful enough to lure a person outside.
In case part of what he was doing upstairs was keeping an eye on the camera, I kept letting my gaze drift out to that sunset as I cleaned the kitchen. I acted like I was infatuated with the scenery. In truth I was a bit taken with it, but it wasn’t my first time seeing a drop-dead gorgeous sunset over a river, either.
I made myself a cup of tea and walked over to the glass wall with it. I stood there, sipping my tea, while staring at the sun and the sky’s progression of lighting and coloring. After a few moments, and a few calm sips, I slowly allowed myself to move towards the door. My actions were key here, even if he wasn’t watching now, he might go back and review it, questioning my true motives. Distractedly, but without hesitation, I slid the door open and walked outside. I carried my cup over to a lounge chair, sat down, and waited for his reaction as I enjoyed the drifting clouds.
I didn’t have to wait long. Seconds after I’d settled myself, I heard him rushing down the stairs. I couldn’t help my smug smile at his predictability. I contorted my features into blissful peace before his footfalls reached the planks of the porch.
He came out with gun in hand. Once he spotted me, he came to a quick stop.
I gave him a look that was half perplexed,
half afraid. “What’s the matter?”
He gave me a wary look, and kept his gaze firmly glued to mine as he holstered his weapon. He sat down in the chair next to me, laid his right hand on top of the pocket holding his knife, and shifted his expression to interrogatory. “What are you doing out here?”
I mustered up the best version of mock innocence that I possessed. “Watching the sunset.”
“Why did you think you could come outside?”
I shifted through my arsenal of forced expressions and gave him a look of confusion. “You’re home… I thought I could come out as far as the porch, as long as you’re home… Isn’t that our new normal?”
His eyes searched my face for some sign of an ulterior motive. Not finding any, he suddenly relaxed. He’d apparently decided that I was as unobservant as I pretended to be, as I used to be, and just hadn’t associated the open door and his location with permission to sit outside.
Good, believe me to be stupid. If I could bend this little rule and get away with it, then I think I may have just orchestrated a slight power shift.
It had been an excuse that he could have easily ripped to shreds. The only time I had ever shown any kind of true stupidity was in thinking that I could easily escape him. Underestimating his capabilities had been my only true line of unintelligent thought since he met me.
I had tried to mentally prepare myself for either a barrage of questioning, or for his condescension. What I was ill prepared to deal with was his easy acceptance of my explanation. In my mind, this kind of reaction could only mean one thing; he must genuinely want to believe me.
He was choosing to have a peaceful evening, rather than fighting with me on this. I was stunned that it had been so easy. I had expected to be yanked by the arm and shoved back inside the doorway, at the very least.
We had moved into uncharted territory here, and I knew he’d be on edge the entire time we stayed out here. He might have shifted his expression to one of calm, cool collection, but I knew one wrong move or comment and I’d regret it.
Lulling the Kidnapper Page 5
