by AJ Scudiere
The man had come here, opened their door, and tested her lights. He did this within days after traipsing around their land and returning even after she’d shot at him. Today, he’d been bolder, pushier.
Though she wasn’t proud of what she’d done, though her stomach turned at the thought, Kayla did not regret her actions. She only hoped that Ivy was still alive somewhere and that shooting and killing Bell hadn’t endangered her friend in any way.
Kayla fell asleep on the wish that tomorrow would be the day she would find Ivy.
A short while later she was awakened in the dark by an odd smell and a hand pressing down on her.
What someone didn’t know was that awakening her in the middle of the night was a mistake.
Coming out of the deep cycle of her sleep to the invasion of another person in her space, she felt the bed shift as she struck out. In her haze, she was stronger than anyone her size had the right to be.
“Bitch!” came in a hissed voice from somewhere in the darkness, and she felt a slap aimed for her face, but her frantic movements batted the attack away with her arm before the blow could really land.
She came fully awake to another voice further away.
“She’s autistic. That’s why she’s reacting that way.”
She was opening her mouth to yell, “No I’m not!” when she inhaled the thick and sticky sweet air again.
Suspecting chloroform or something of the like, she held her breath and went limp. Chloroform took a long time to work, which most people didn’t know. So Kayla played to the stereotype.
Though waking her in the middle of the night had been a mistake, and she had certainly given as good as she’d gotten, whoever it was hadn’t made a second error with the chloroform. They held on tight, keeping the fabric close over her mouth and nose, and so, running out of time and desperately needing to take a breath, Kayla faked a moan.
The bitter flavor flooded her airways making her woozy, but as she moved she managed to sneak a hand under her pillow and hit a button on her cell phone before her skull pushed inward on her brain and everything went black.
21
Hazelton House
Evan’s lungs burned from the whip-fast speed of his breathing. But he didn’t notice the hard earth, didn’t see the overhead light shining down from the edge of the kitchen building, or that he skipped all the steps between his bed and the big house. Not until he made it through the back door and was rapidly climbing the main staircase to the second floor did he realize he’d left without socks or shoes.
He had no memory of coming awake, only of holding his buzzing phone and answering it in a cold sweat. “Kayla?!” He’d been alert as he answered, because why would Kayla even be awake in the middle of the night unless something was very wrong? So Evan was flooded with adrenaline long before she failed to answer his frantic repetitions of her name. He was strung tight before he heard a soft zipping sound and a hushed instruction in a voice that wasn’t remotely like Kayla’s.
So he’d run, sailed really, as fast as he could, his brain on laser-focus much like the sister he’d come to rescue, so much so that he’d honed in on her bedroom to the negligence of all else. And as he arrived at the open door, empty room and neatly made bed, he heard the noise far behind him and only then registered what he’d heard as he’d hurled himself up the back steps: a car starting out in the front driveway.
Fighting a clammy sweat and knowing better than to waste time by looking through a window he wouldn’t be able to jump from, Evan turned and leapt back down the same two turns of steps he’d climbed just seconds before. He never was sure if his feet had hit any of the stairs or if he jumped the whole distance.
Flinging open the front door revealed that the car was already halfway down the drive and gaining speed.
The sedan bounced three times before Evan’s feet hit the dirt and gravel embedded from a century of tires and a century of hand-turned wagon wheels before that. The hard dirt beneath him pushed back and held him up, propelled him forward. The car bounced again before he thought to check the license plate. In the dim light he could only see that he couldn’t see.
So he ran, thinking about the color of the car. Well out of the range of the lights near the house now, he could tell only that it was a light color, maybe a cream, or a goldish tone. Something with a pale sheen that distorted his view and his ability to make out the lines, lowered his chances of being able to identify the vehicle later.
He ran to the end of the long driveway as the car, already turned onto the main street and having picked up speed with the traction of solid road, disappeared into the deep distance. The glow of the taillights fading at the same time as he finally gulped in air.
Ice crystallized in his system replacing the heavy heat that had kept him going.
He’d made a horrible mistake.
He’d made a series of them. Possibly fatal.
He should never have let Kayla stay by herself. They should never have gone anywhere alone after the first set of footprints had been found. But the prints had seemed rather benign. Their intruder appeared rude, pushy even, but not violent. Taking unwarranted pictures was obnoxious; patent infringement was a gentleman’s game. This was suddenly nothing of the sort.
Though Kayla and Ivy apparently liked the heat at night, the weather kept the big house just warm enough for him and Reenie to cuddle together in a nearby room and prevent this. But they hadn’t done it. They’d all been swayed by a logical argument.
And when he’d come in the back tonight, he’d gone directly upstairs to Kayla’s room. But as he came in the back door, he’d heard the closing of a car door out front. He knew that now.
He’d simply failed to place the sound.
Had he run through the house, or even around, he might have tackled one of them. He might have wrested his sister away. Hurt one of them. Taken one to hold hostage as Kayla had suggested they do with Robert Bell. He could have had ransom. But he had nothing.
He had only his pajama bottoms and his cut-up feet and his empty hands.
“Ev?”
Startled, he turned sharply at the soft sound.
Reenie, exhausted, came jogging up behind him. Though she moved like she was heading out for a workout, he knew by the fact that she was so close behind him that she’d flat out run most of the way. She had shoes on her feet, but the laces were tucked in the sides haphazardly and one had already come loose. She was in danger of tripping flat on her face.
Reaching down, he tucked in the lace. He could do that. He could prevent Reenie from falling and hurting herself, from injuring his family even more than it had been injured tonight. It was all he accomplished.
Reenie had tears running down her face and she didn’t bother to ask him what had happened, didn’t ask if Kayla had been in the car. She tugged at his hand and pulled him back up toward the house. “We need to look around and see if there’s anything we can figure out. If we’re lucky someone dropped their driver’s license with a valid address.”
He wanted to snort, to disabuse her of the notion that they would find anything useful, but he didn’t want to steal away the only hope they had. He had virtually nothing on the car. Not the model, make, or year. The hard earth and stone of the drive wouldn’t likely yield tire prints. And there was nothing to point him to where his sister had been taken. They were pointed toward Springfield. And the rest of the continental US.
Pulling him by the hand, Reenie led him back to the house, and Evan blindly followed, his mind anywhere but here. He soon found she’d put shoes and a shirt on him and grabbed a sweater for herself, but still never actually tied her shoes. She grabbed their phones and he grabbed the gun he hadn’t bothered to pick up when he ran.
When they arrived back at the second-floor bedroom, he got a better look around.
The bed, which had appeared unslept-in at his frantic first glance, was now clearly mussed and hastily turned back up. A shoe—Kayla’s—lay on its side in the corner of the room. Th
e other remained tucked under the bed, just to the right of middle, toe pointed perpendicular to the edge, pushed just deep enough to line up with the side slat. That was something Kayla had done. The other had been placed by someone else, likely kicked. Which meant that Kayla had struggled.
Frowning, Evan glanced at Reenie, “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to find Kayla’s phone.” She didn’t look up, just kept texting. “She downloaded a locator on her phone and mine and Ivy’s. Didn’t she do yours?”
“I don’t know.” He answered to the top of her head, then jerked as he started to look over the room again. He reached for the phone in Reenie’s hands. “Wait! Don’t set off her phone!”
Reenie yanked it back and frowned at him. “It doesn’t alert the phone at all. Just pulls up a map and GPS locates it. It’s for stolen phones. You don’t want the thief to know you’re tracking him. Look.”
She held the phone up with the map on it. Sadly there were very few roads around the phone’s location. But Evan was grateful; this was the best information they had on his sister’s whereabouts. “Is it in real time?”
Reenie frowned and pulled the phone closer to her face to peer at the map. “It’s supposed to be.” Then she huffed out. “The last location this thing has is here on the plantation. Maybe Kayla turned it off to preserve the battery? To keep it from dinging and making noise? That’s what I would do.”
That would be awesome, Evan thought. That would mean that his sister was alive and of sound mind. Scared maybe, in trouble yes. But not dead.
He pushed that thought away as fast as it came through, in one neuron and right out the other.
Reenie shook her head and pocketed her phone. “I’ll try again later.”
Evan turned to go. He had other places to search, he wanted to get in the car and see if he could psychically follow the kidnappers. He knew that was as stupid as it sounded, but he had to do something or he would be consumed by the burning in his gut. This had happened on his watch.
But Reenie didn’t follow him. And he couldn’t—wouldn’t—leave even the room without her. It was down to only him and her. They’d been getting picked off. And he’d been too stupid to see that right away. So now he didn’t let her out of his sight.
Reenie seemed determined to turn Kayla’s room inside out before she left. It was now glaringly obvious that she had been taken from here. Though an attempt had been made to make the room look normal, whoever had her hadn’t covered all evidence of struggle. That, too, meant Kayla was likely alive. Evan took solace in the fact that she was useful, smart, and resourceful.
The extra searching didn’t help. The room yielded nothing, only that Evan was angry at Reenie for holding him back, for slowing the process. But he couldn’t take it out on her when it wasn’t really her fault. She simply was acting on her own hunches, and maybe even some logic, rather than reacting to the churning in him that was getting worse by the minute. He could vomit or he could yell, and he could afford to do neither.
Instead, he ripped the covers from the bed, angry with the world, worried sick and taking it all out on the bedding. The pillow collapsed in his rough grip, and he snapped his arm to throw it, angry that it wouldn’t shatter, make noise, or yield any satisfaction at all.
But as the pillow hit the ground behind him with a soft thud, his eyes found the shiny object.
Kayla’s phone was there. She didn’t have it with her.
Kayla sat back against the cold floor.
Her hands were no longer bound behind her back, but they had been, and for quite some time. Her muscles had acclimated to the position, making every other option hurt. Kayla fought it, working toward a pain-free full range of motion.
Her head throbbed, compounding her problems.
She couldn’t see, but that didn’t matter much. Without her sight, she didn’t panic, she simply shut her eyes so as to avoid even the idea of images and changed her focus.
Something gurgled behind her and then stopped. She’d heard the noise before when she was first coming around. It sounded like pipes. She breathed in deeply and ran her hands along the surfaces below and behind her. The air felt moist and smelled as though it had been that way for a long time. Though it wasn’t foul, it was definitely not her normal above-ground air. The chill in the floor and the wall behind her matched the cement and cinderblock she could plainly feel with her hands, and the occasional hint of heavy movement overhead led her to conclude she was in a basement.
Once she decided that, she converted back to the use of her eyes. Opening them, she sat still waiting for adjustment. There might be a door or a high window, a small amount of light that she wouldn’t see unless she waited.
But as she sat still, she heard something else.
Someone else.
Her facial muscles pulled into a frown as her own breathing ceased in an effort to hear more.
And there it was. Though the other person was trying to be silent too, a live human simply couldn’t quite pull that off in a quiet environment like this. So Kayla went with what she felt was the only option.
“Hello?”
She heard breath whooshing out of lungs, hands and feet scrambling, indicating that the other person was no more bound than she herself was. Raising her arms to her face, to protect from whoever was clearly coming at her, Kayla was unprepared for the next thing she heard.
“Kay? Is that you?”
“Ivy!”
Diving toward the sound, she reached out, for once in her life desperate to make contact, to touch another human being. But just as she touched skin, shirt, a hand, a knee, Ivy spoke harshly and pushed her away.
“Hush.”
Kayla was only confused for a second.
Abruptly, she sat back against the wall, fast enough to be hard, and hard enough to almost knock the wind out of herself. She barely achieved the lazy, motionless look she was going for before the rude squeak of the door added to heavy footsteps.
Light came from above, pouring in from the top of the staircase, showing her that she was exactly where she’d thought—a cinderblock basement, unfinished and rare in this wet clime. That explained the dampness. She’d already deduced she was still in Georgia, and probably not too far from home unless they were in another area far too similar to her own.
There was a shadow at the top, a man, casting out portions of light and obscuring his own face as he did it.
Kayla was relatively certain that it was the same man who’d come into her room and taken her. The build was strikingly similar. She blanked her face, even though she was tucked back in the shadows and didn’t think he could see her. Ivy, too, stilled.
He laughed a moment, and Kayla felt her blood chill. It wasn’t that his laugh was maniacal. It was just the opposite. He was amused. She imagined it was the same laugh he would use while drinking a beer and watching TV—which showed how little he thought of this situation. Of Ivy. Of her.
“Don’t worry.” He tilted his head as though trying to get a better look at the two of them and Kayla immediately averted her eyes. She stared boldly at the most innocuous thing she could find—an exposed pipe, right in the middle, not even at a seam—and studied it. It had markings, some kind of writing in white marker and blocky print. She tapped her fingers, counting out how long the pipe was. Six feet, three inches—putting the ceiling height under seven feet down here, an odd six-ten-and-a-half.
He spoke again.
“You two can talk all you want. If she even can talk. There’s nothing you can do.”
She still couldn’t match the tone and timbre to the whisper from the night before, not yet. So Kayla maintained her focus, wondering about the pipe and now that she was looking at it, could it be of any use?
The man said one last thing, “You know what to do.” And then he shut the door, pushing them into a darkness worse than they had been in before. She’d been close to seeing things, able to make out some shapes before he’
d light-blinded her.
Now Kayla forced herself to wait. She didn’t want to bump into Ivy and crack their heads; she didn’t want the man upstairs to think anything he didn’t already. And she wanted a moment to review in the darkness the mental pictures she had just formed as Ivy had squinted and held her hand up to block the light.
She wore a large flannel shirt that Kayla had not seen before. Given the size, it was likely that the man or men had given it to her. And given Ivy’s propensity for tank tops and shorts, she was probably freezing down here. Kayla wondered how she should go about getting a spare shirt of her own. She wasn’t cold, but faking it couldn’t hurt.
Ivy had moved her arm oddly, Kayla could still see the snapshot in her mind of Ivy turning her head away from the light and attempting to shield her face. It appeared she didn’t want to bend her elbow, and her knees had looked a little bruised. Her fingers looked okay. What Kayla was checking for, and glad she didn’t find, were defensive wounds. Bruises along the bone at the outer forearm, anything on Ivy’s face. It appeared that she’d fought at one point, maybe struck out at someone, but that it hadn’t gone too badly. Not for Ivy, and sadly, it didn’t look like she’d done too much damage to the other guy either.
The footsteps upstairs had retreated, and Kayla could hear Ivy coming across the floor to her. She didn’t speak, maybe not wanting to alert anyone on the next floor up.
With nothing else around to mask the noise, Kayla could tell exactly where Ivy was; it was almost as clear as sight. So the hands reaching out and touching her weren’t a surprise. The arms that came around her were warm, flannel covered and comforting. It was the mouth that found hers in a soft, brief kiss that stole her breath and shocked her to stillness.
But then Ivy held her tight, breathing in and out slowly, her forehead resting against Kayla’s. “I’m sorry they got you here.”
“We were looking for you.”
She could almost see the smile on Ivy’s face, and it interfered with the kiss that pressed to her own cheek, the kiss she was becoming more accustomed to. Ivy’s voice was almost rough sounding from her attempt to keep it from bouncing off the walls and reverberating everywhere. She spoke into the pocket of space between them. “They thought they covered most of it up. That you wouldn’t notice I was gone. But I knew you would figure it out.”
