Dark Lie (9781101607084)

by Springer, Nancy;

  He sat for a moment staring into Dorrie’s closet. Her dresses whispered “Dorrie” to him even though she wasn’t there. Dresses made of soft fabric in gentle feminine colors. Modest dresses, long by today’s standards, styled to cling to her waist and swing from her hips. Dorrie didn’t wear slacks, not because of her upbringing, but because of the way lupus had enlarged her butt. Generous skirts allowed her comfort while turning her so-called “affliction” into an asset, at least as far as Sam was concerned. A lot of the dresses Dorrie sewed herself so she could choose the fabrics she loved and trim them the way she liked. Sam considered himself lucky; how many men had wives who almost always wore pretty dresses?

  Oh, Dorrie.

  Sam didn’t like to take risks. He had hesitated to open the closet. But the results had been productive.

  Trying not to think about what he was doing, Sam ran his hand down the side of the bed and slipped his fingers between the mattress and the box spring.

  * * *

  The kidnapper’s van. I’d found it, and my heart beat hard, harder, because—please, God—Juliet couldn’t be far away.

  If I could just find a phone, I’d have the cops on the spot within five minutes, even if I had to lie. Say I was holding a gun to my head. No, say I was stabbed by a mugger, dying. Whatever.

  Phone. Get to a phone that worked.

  I ran for my car, perched on the sidewalk at the street corner beside the dud phone. Running on high-test adrenaline, I hopped behind the wheel as if I’d never heard of lupus, started the car, slapped it into gear, and stepped hard on the accelerator.

  The engine revved, but the car didn’t move. Not an inch.

  My heart lurched, turned over, fell like a stone.

  Now, hold on, Dorrie. Don’t panic.

  Even though the emergency brake had never worked properly since I’d owned the Kia, I checked to make sure it was off. Yep.

  I pressed the gas again.

  With the same result: plenty of engine noise, but no forward progress.

  I tried it in reverse.

  Ditto with no reverse progress. No, I would not have considered that an oxymoron, not under the circumstances: dire.

  Now, of course, I remembered hearing cautionary tales of people breaking tie-rods or axles by taking speed bumps too fast. What had I done to the Kia, jumping it over the curb onto the sidewalk?

  A couple more times I attempted to get my car moving, but already I knew it was no use. My adrenaline-induced energy drained away, leaving me with the bleak knowledge that everything was wrong and it was my fault, as usual.

  I turned off the Kia.

  Now I felt my ankles aching, my knees aching, my back singing the blues. I got out of the Kia to flex my painful joints while I tried to think what to do.

  Help. Once again I felt as if I could barely stand upright, let alone deal with an abductor. I need someone to help me.

  Half-panicky, barely able to focus, I looked all around, searching for any sign of life in Appletree. But the town appeared dead. I saw not even a stray cat moving. Nothing but shadows.

  But light came from somewhere to cast the shadows.

  Finally it occurred to me to glance upward.

  I breathed out, and only then noticed that I’d been holding my breath.

  No, I didn’t see anyone who might help me. Yet. But a few third-story windows of the downtown buildings showed illumination, wan lightbulb yellow or glacial blue TV glow. As a kid I’d noticed only the shops on ground level—shoe repair, maternity clothing, locksmith—but it would appear that there were apartments upstairs, with people in them.

  Okay, my car was immobilized, but I was not; I could walk. I could ring doorbells. I would eventually find help, capital-H Help. Someone—I found myself envisioning a man just like Sam—someone strong, kind, capable, a Good Samaritan.

  With a viable telephone.

  Meanwhile, what would the kidnapper do?

  At the thought of him I stepped closer to the Kia, wanting to dive back into the otherwise useless car and hide from him. Illogically, a spidery sense that he was watching me crawled along my shoulders. I seemed to feel his hostile stare from one of the boarded-up, lifeless windows ranked in first-floor and second-floor rows along my side of the empty library. Dumb, I told myself sternly, because why would he be in the library, and even if he were, how could he see through plywood? Stop it, Dorrie. Stop dithering, being paranoid, paying attention to—to nothing, just a creepy feeling.

  Still, it made sense to think the kidnapper could be someplace close by. Maybe even in one of those apartment buildings. He might have heard me pull in or seen me snooping around. Now, in order to go for help, I’d have to turn my back on the van, and the kidnapper might take Juliet and get away. All he needed to do was put air in the tires and drive off.

  I had to keep that from happening.

  I took a deep breath, released it, and tried to square my sagging shoulders. Forget phoning the police for just a few minutes longer. First, I had to disable that van.

  FIVE

  Sam rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt and knelt by Dorrie’s side of the bed. Hoisting the mattress with one hand, he probed under it with the other. His fingertips encountered paper, and gripped.

  He pulled out two items, one stacked on top of the other. The first was a nine-by-twelve manila business envelope that looked as if it had been around for a while, its corners worn floppy, its mustard-colored paper as soft and nappy as a baby’s well-loved flannel blanket. The other item, about the same size, looked almost new: a bright paper folder made of crisp pebble-textured card stock, Easter egg pink.

  Being psychologically allergic to the color pink, Sam opened the manila envelope first. Sitting on the bed, he pinched the wire fastener, lifted the flap, and pulled out a rather messy stack of notebook paper.

  Messy, because edges had been torn off to shape the papers into crude squares, and the squares had been folded and refolded at angles that made no sense. Picking one up and smoothing it out, Sam scanned large printed pencil lettering that said, “My Candy so sweet, now I’ve found you at last, every minute I stay away from you is torcher. I’m starving for—”

  Sam thrust the note away, muttering, “None of my business.” So Dorrie had kept the love letters some boy had sent her; so what? He couldn’t expect Dorrie to have been faithful to him before she even knew him. When were these things written? Sam didn’t want to read anymore; he felt queasy even touching the letters, but hastily he scanned the rest of the notes to see if he could find a date on any of them. No, but it didn’t matter. Everything about them spelled high school. Notebook paper. With some age to it. Yellowing. And the callow content, occasionally misspelled, and the boy’s big childish printing—even his signature, “Blake,” was printed, in letters that tried to topple off the edge of the paper.

  Funny, Sam thought, that Dorrie had never mentioned this Blake boy to him. You’d think she—

  “She doesn’t have to tell me anything she doesn’t want to,” Sam said aloud, fiercely contradicting his earlier prayers regarding the silence, the space, he sensed between Dorrie and him. Sam laid the notebook-paper letters aside, resenting them because Dorrie had saved them and hidden them from him and there had to be something. . . . No. Don’t go there. Quickly, before he could think anything else stupid, he picked up the pink folder and opened it.

  Except it wasn’t just a folder full of papers, he saw at once. Rather, this was a lovingly handmade book. Or scrapbook, its pastel pink fabric-textured pages bordered with a dainty rosebud-and-apple-blossom print. The background paper was of such fine quality that it made the computer printouts carefully arranged on it look all too much like, well, computer printouts. Of news articles.

  And photographs. Computer printouts, again, from the local newspaper or maybe from school yearbooks
.

  All of them photos of the same teenage girl.

  At first sight of that girl, Sam knew who it was. Why, he wondered, flipping through the pages, would Dorrie be hiding a scrapbook about herself as a teenager?

  But at second glance, starting over and focusing on a single color copy of a photograph, he felt his eyes widen. It wasn’t Dorrie.

  There was something just a little different about—not the lovely large eyes themselves, but their expression. More sure, more sophisticated. And the poise. The smile, not shy like Dorrie’s smile.

  Under the picture, in sky blue ink, Dorrie’s careful round handwriting labeled it “Juliet, 10th Grade.”

  Sam passed over pictures of Juliet in ninth, eighth, and seventh grades to scan a computer printout of a newspaper clipping about a debutante affair at the Fulcrum Country Club. The caption told him that the gowned girl second from the right was Juliet Phillips.

  Phillips?

  It took Sam a minute to connect. Phillips. District attorney. News. Daughter. Abducted.

  His gut tightened and lurched as if he were going to be seasick.

  Now, don’t go jumping to confusions, he ordered himself. Maybe there was more than one Phillips girl. Maybe it was a different girl who had gone missing. Maybe the missing girl had nothing whatsoever to do with his missing wife.

  But why in the world would Dorrie be keeping a very pink, very flowery scrapbook about any Phillips girl under her mattress?

  Sam stood up and wheeled to attack. Seizing the mattress, he wrenched it upward and flung it clear off the bed to see whether anything else was hidden under there.

  Nothing was.

  He stood panting, leaving the mattress where it leaned against the edge of the box spring with the bedclothes slipping down its sides like frosting melting off a cake. It didn’t matter, because he wasn’t going to bed anytime soon. Grimly Sam accepted that he was not likely to get any sleep tonight.

  He took a deep breath, put his brain into business mode, and considered his options.

  Option one: Continue pacing and wanting to puke and waiting for the phone to ring. Counterproductive. Reactive rather than proactive. Also torturous. He couldn’t stand much more of it.

  Option two: Call the police. Possibly productive. But also risky. They were likely to think Dorrie was mixed up with the Phillips abduction somehow.

  Option three: Get in the car and go looking for Dorrie himself. Problem: He wouldn’t be home if she called. Tentative solution: Take his cell phone with him and hope she’d call that one too. Go to Appletree—

  But it would take him three, maybe four hours to get there. And meanwhile he couldn’t be anywhere else. Whereas the police could be looking for Dorrie and her car all over Ohio within minutes.

  Okay, maybe they’d go looking for the wrong reason, thinking she’d done something illegal. But what did it matter, as long as they found her safe?

  Also, face it—maybe Dorrie had done something. . . . Trying to figure out what was going on was like trying to look at one of those pictures Dorrie used to like back in Appreciation of Modern Art, one of those eye-blinker things by whatsisname, Escher, the ones that looked like puzzles where the shapes changed and a checkerboard tablecloth turned into black and white toads. Sam admitted to himself that, having no idea what was going on, he could not rule out the possibility that Dorrie had done something, well, unwise.

  But if Dorrie had gotten herself mixed up in anything fishy, it would be because of her naïveté. Dorrie was an innocent.

  If Dorrie had done something stupid, he’d stand by her.

  First and foremost he had to ensure that she was okay.

  Sam’s LDS upbringing had made him function out of a bone-deep belief in rules, laws, and justice. He didn’t know how not to be a law-abiding man. Now, as he reached for the bedside phone to call the police, he chewed his lower lip, hoping he was right to believe the system worked, praying that he was helping Dorrie, not hurting her.

  * * *

  With my mind made up—like a bed, I suppose, which I now had to lie upon—I got moving.

  I found myself looking over my shoulder as I walked to the parking lot this time, and treading quietly, with my flashlight off. Meanwhile, I tried to think how to disable the van. What would my imaginary big, strong, kind Good Samaritan do?

  What would Sam do?

  Thinking of Sam, I felt a lonely longing for him wash over me. I wished he were here with me to help. . . . Wait. He was helping. I vaguely recalled that he had once told me a story about a high school prank involving a potato rammed up some vehicle’s tailpipe.

  Standing behind the driver’s side of the van, away from the library, I began to fumble in my bag. Although I was hardly likely to find a potato in there, maybe I could improvise.

  The best I could come up with was a plump Kleenex pack, brand-new.

  I rolled it, compressing it as tightly as I could. Crouching in the shadow of the van, beside its left rear wheel, I groped for the tailpipe, then rammed my plug of tissue into it as hard as I could.

  There.

  I struggled to my feet to make my escape—

  No. Not yet.

  What I had done with the Kleenex did not feel adequate.

  I doubted it would work. It seemed too simple. Maybe the potato story had been one of Sam’s straight-faced jokes. He amused himself that way occasionally, telling me whoppers, knowing I was so gullible and serious-minded that I would believe almost anything.

  I needed to be absolutely certain I’d put this van out of action.

  I could loosen the bastard’s hood latch, the way he had loosened mine. But—risk a crash in which Juliet might be hurt? No. Absolutely not.

  My next, more sensible thought was to open the bastard’s hood, yes, but then vandalize his engine. I’d never in my life so much as touched a car engine, but I felt sure I could yank out wires and hoses, maybe even unscrew nameless metal parts and fling them into the night.

  At the thought I felt a dark, vengeful energy lending me strength. Good. Do it.

  First I needed to pull the hood lever, which is usually located somewhere below and to the left of the steering wheel.

  Flicking my flashlight on but keeping it down behind the van, I slipped a few silent steps forward to try the driver’s-side door.

  Locked.

  Already having decided on a course of destruction, I did not hesitate. The flashlight with which Sam had equipped me was of studly masculine dimensions, with a heft to it. Flicking it off, I raised it, swung as if I were trying to kill a man-sized cockroach, and smashed the window glass.

  BLAAT, blasted the van’s horn, startling me so badly I squeaked. BLAAT. “Dammit!” Dumb, dumb, dumb, but the way the van looked junked, BLAAT, somehow I hadn’t thought there would be a security system.

  As if the noise had hit me a physical blow, almost falling, I staggered back.

  From somewhere in the darkness behind the library, on the far side of the van from me, came a metallic kind of slam, as if from a garage door going down. Then I heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel. Rapid, but heavy and hard. A man wearing boots. Running toward me.

  Was it the kidnapper? He hadn’t been wearing boots before.

  But there was no time to dither about details. BLAAT. BLAAT. BLAAT. Ongoing.

  Without knowing what I was doing, afraid to turn my back, I stumbled away until I bumped against the splintering plank fence.

  Trapped.

  There was nowhere to hide.

  Except in the thick darkness and remnants of last year’s weeds. Camouflaged only by my old brown car coat and the long skirt of my denim blue corduroy dress, I flattened myself on the ground beside the fence, behind the weeds. I froze like a supersized bunny just as the booted man dashed around the back of the
van. Trying not to think about what kinds of insects, garbage, or other biting or stinky stuff might be there in the weeds with me, I lay completely still.

  BLAAT, BLAAT, yet I found myself holding my breath to listen as the man scrabbled with his keys to get the van unlocked. Then the door clicked open and the dome light came on. I kept my head down, shamelessly praying he wouldn’t see me, but I also kept my eyes open. Couldn’t see much from my grass-roots angle, but I caught glimpses of motion as he reached inside the van to thrust a key into the ignition.

  The noise stopped.

  The silence felt almost more frightening than the clamor had been. I cringed. He could probably have heard my breathing if he had listened; I was panting now, and couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop myself. But he didn’t listen. He swore, I heard a glassy crash, and the dome light stopped shining. My breathing quieted. Darker felt better. I could still hear the booted man cursing the van, its horn, its dome light, its broken window, and whoever had inflicted that iniquity upon it—

  He broke off.

  Then said more softly but even more fervidly, “What the hell? That can’t be the same goddamn Kia.”

  Yes, he was the kidnapper.

  He stood rigidly staring away from me, silhouetted against the faint ambient light of Appletree. All I could tell about him for certain was that he had darkish hair, his appearance was consistent with that of the all-too-average man I’d seen at the Exxon, and he’d changed clothes. He wore what looked like an all-black outfit now, maybe to blend into the night.

  Or maybe to look even scarier than he already was.

  Peering toward the corner where the pay phone stood useless and my car likewise, he muttered, “I can’t believe that fat interfering bitch!” With admirable control he shut the van door quietly, after which I could hear him sprinting toward the library.

  Now was my chance to get away, but it was as if my body had taken a blow of some sort that my mind refused to acknowledge. Without understanding why, I felt weak, shaky, unsteady, and not just from the aches and fever of a severe lupus flare. If I tried to get up, I knew, I would struggle for balance, and I wouldn’t be able to move fast enough.