I had to try anyway.
But wait. What about Juliet? Was running away to find a phone the best I could do to help her?
I had to help her.
I stayed where I was.
Once again I heard that noise, sounded like some kind of metal door, reverberate in the night.
Then I heard him coming back. The man in boots.
Along with someone else. Someone whose lighter footsteps dragged and scuffled in the gravel.
He ordered, “Get in.”
His was a voice of such mastery, such command, such nearly hypnotic authority, that my whole body jerked, wanting to jump up and obey him. Even though he wasn’t speaking to me.
I expected to hear the van door opening. Instead, I heard a girl say in gentle, reasonable tones, “But I don’t want to.”
I breathed out almost with a sob. It had to be Juliet. She was alive. My daughter was alive, at least. And oh, God, she had a sweet, soft alto voice. I’d been longing to hear her voice, but not like this. Not at midnight, in a lonely dark parking lot, in the company of a kidnapper.
He told her again, “Get in.”
“Why don’t you just let me go?” Except for a slight tremor, she was in perfect control of her voice. Just asking, her tone said, not whining, not defying. “What do you want me for? I’m not pretty. I—”
“Yes, you are. More than pretty. You’re beautiful.”
“No, my head’s too small and my neck’s too long. That’s what they call me at school, Neck. Or Gooseneck. I’m not—”
“Shut up. You’re beautiful. You’re Candy.” His voice didn’t rise; rather it reverberated with a note of tent-revival hysteria. “You’re the only kind of candy I like, and I’ve just started to taste you. You can’t tell me you don’t like the way I kiss.”
“I hate it.” Now her low tone held defiance. She had spirit. Good. My daughter was not passive, the way I had been at her age.
“You like it! You love it!”
“I hate it and I hate you.”
“You are going to love it and you are going to get in the van.” I heard a scrape of gravel as he shoved or dragged her toward the door. “You are going to do what I say and I am going to taste everything about you and you are never going to leave me. Nobody gets to leave me ever again. Never.”
She whispered, “I’m not trying to leave you. I just want to go home and—”
“Nobody gets to take you away. You’re coming with me. I am going to taste everything about you. Everything. Including your blood.”
I heard a muffled scraping sound.
“Put the knife away. Please.” Poor child, she couldn’t control her voice anymore. It shook badly.
“Call her by name. Show respect, like I told you.”
“Please put Pandora back in the sheath.” She sounded close to tears.
“First you get in the van.”
I heard the passenger’s-side door open. Flattening myself as if I were the one being threatened, I heard her climb into the seat.
“Buckle yourself in. There. Now you’re Candy. Now you’re sweet, sweet Candy.” Softer, his voice seemed even more compelling. “Don’t you see, silly Candy girl? It will be perfect. Everything one step at a time.”
I heard the kidnapper slam the passenger door. Heard his hard-booted footsteps crunch to the rear of the van. Heard him open it.
No, he wasn’t a kidnapper. Time to face it: This had nothing to do with ransom money. It was about sexual perversion. He was an abductor.
And what he intended to do to Juliet—
But I couldn’t yet face it all.
I lay in the benighted weeds hurting all over, feeling sick, sick, sick. Every part of me comprehended utterly. Except my mind.
There, in my brain, where it might have helped, I flatly refused to recognize, realize, know. Instead, I assured myself that “candy” was a common metaphor. The man’s voice had been deep, probably too deep, nothing similar there except intensity. The writing on the library wall was recent, not left over from years ago.
Coincidence. Odd coincidences did happen.
Some kind of weed I was lying in smelled so foul I wanted to vomit. Fighting down my gag reflex and the noise it would make, I heard the abductor’s footsteps taking their time to the driver’s door, then the click as it opened. A rhythmic chugging sound began. What the—
Air pump. I’d forgotten about the flat tires.
I had a little time to do something.
Now that there was ambient noise to cover any sound I might make, I no longer felt so queasy. I eased my head up for a look, and sure enough, I could make out a sort of mound in the gloom. Him, hunkered over his left front tire with his back to me, operating one of those tire pumps that plug into the cigarette lighter, very similar to the one I’d used to tie down my hood. Audible, but not noisy. Not loud enough to wake up the neighbors and make them call the cops.
But maybe loud enough so that he wouldn’t hear me if I moved.
Do something, Dorrie!
But I felt as if I couldn’t get up off the ground. Shaky hungry. Dead tired. Flattened. Sick at heart. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black combat boots, like someone I used to know—
Don’t think. Act.
The tire pump quit. I felt so far gone that even the sudden silence didn’t scare me, didn’t make me flex a muscle. Dully I listened—okay, he was moving to the rear tire. Pump noise started up again.
Next he’d move around to Juliet’s side, and—
Juliet.
My daughter.
Tired crying self be damned. I had to save Juliet. Nothing else mattered.
Had to do something now. This minute. While his back was to me. Before he moved on.
Staggering to my feet, I stood swaying for a moment as I focused on the vague form, a darker thing in the darkness, of the man crouching by the van’s rear tire. I located the back of his head and concentrated on it. I put one foot forward, then the other. Advancing. Didn’t need to try to sneak up on him. He couldn’t hear me, didn’t turn to see me. I wobbled up behind him, hefted my flashlight, and clubbed him as hard as I could, right at the base of his skull, just like the tough guys did on TV.
It worked. He slumped to the gravel.
I screamed over the noise of the air pump, “Juliet, run!”
* * *
Opening the front door, Sam said reluctantly, “Um, come on in.” He hadn’t expected the police would want to be so thorough. He’d thought he would just explain that his wife was missing and he had reason to believe there was a connection to the Phillips case, he’d give a description of Dorrie’s car, and hi-ho Silver, a posse would form.
But they had sent someone to his house to take a report, a uniformed officer who, to Sam’s tired surprise, was a skinny black girl—okay, young woman, but her soft caramel-colored face looked about sixteen years old, and her police tunic and slacks seemed too big for her. Stepping into his living room, she scanned slowly almost full circle, as if her head were a video cam recording the place, and he felt a disconcerting sense of keen intelligence at work. She wasn’t just gawking. She would remember details of what she saw, and they would have meaning for her.
“Kittens with butterfly wings?” she inquired of some of Dorrie’s more unusual statuettes.
“Um, yes, they’re Flutterkitties.”
The officer carefully picked one up, looked at the bottom, and set it down again. “Signed originals. She knows the artist?”
“Just online.” Feeling an irrational need to apologize for signed originals, which implied a level of wealth and culture to which he did not aspire, Sam said, “It’s her only hobby. Collecting art.”
The policewoman took her time checking out Dorrie’s display of winged horses—clay, carved wood, ce
ramic, glass—then moved on to the fireplace mantelpiece, home to another collection of porcelain bells upon which perched realistically painted songbirds by way of handles. Gently she lifted one of the bells and tried it out; the tinkling sound of its porcelain clapper could not have been more musical. The officer put the bell back exactly where it belonged. “She has good taste. No kitsch.”
“I met Dorrie in art class at college.” Sam’s throat tightened. He didn’t quite know where that had come from. He had meant to say that Dorrie had minored in art history.
“She likes the, um, is it Impressionists?” The young woman had stopped in front a Redon print of winged horses pulling a sun chariot.
“I’m not sure.” Dorrie’s art collection took up most of the wall space, but somehow did not make the house feel like a museum, Sam thought with dawning appreciation of his wife’s skill as a homemaker; it coexisted comfortably with soft moss green sofas, fern-print drapes, lightweight golden oak tables.
“Angel, by Moreau,” the unlikely cop murmured, pausing in front of another print. “Symbolist?”
“You’d have to ask Dorrie.” Pride in his wife combined oddly with Sam’s painful worry.
“She’s partial to subjects with wings.”
“Yes. Anything with wings. Except airplanes.”
“I guess maybe airplanes are a guy thing. When women dream of just flying away, it’s more organic.”
If the young cop had pulled her gun on him, it could not have startled and discomfited Sam much worse. Too loudly he said, “Dorrie didn’t run away!”
The young woman swiveled to stare at him with wide loam-colored eyes. “I didn’t mean to imply that she did, Mr. White. It’s not at all unusual for women to dream of a fairy-tale kind of freedom. I’m sorry if—”
“Look, miss, I just want to find my wife.”
“My name is Officer Chappell. Sorry, I should have introduced myself when I came in. What was it you wanted to show me?”
Sam took a deep breath, pressed his lips together, and led the way upstairs to the bedroom. Flicking on the light, he said wearily, “In here.” He had thought they would be done before now. He bet Officer Chappell was a rookie, the way she wanted to go over everything one step at a time in slow motion, or so it seemed to Sam. Indicating a location on the box spring of the disheveled bed, he told her, “I found it here.” He picked up the pink folder from a bedside table and handed it to her.
Officer Chappell paged through it in complete silence, then tucked it under her arm and made a note on her spiral-bound stenographic pad. “How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does your wife have a PC?”
“Laptop.”
“If that’s what she used, I can find a history on it.”
What this had to do with finding Dorrie Sam could not imagine, but he said, “She keeps it in her sewing room.” Sam started to show the way out, but the young cop did not come with him. She was swiveling her head again, running her mental camcorder all around the bedroom. Her scanning eyes caught on the squares of notebook paper lying on the mattress and the floor like overlarge confetti. “Were those papers hidden under the mattress too?”
“Yes, but they don’t have anything to do with—”
“May I see them, please?”
Reluctantly Sam picked up a few of Dorrie’s high school flame’s love letters and handed them to Officer Chappell. Scanning them, the young black woman murmured, “Bubba! Hold the phone.”
Trying not to show his annoyance—okay, his jealousy of the letters his wife had kept under the mattress—Sam repeated, “Those don’t have anything to do with, um, with anything.”
Officer Chappell said, “I hope not. Whoever wrote these is a very unstable, potentially violent individual.”
Having seen nothing but sweetness and sexual heat in the content of the notes, Sam blinked. “Where do you get that from?”
“Very revealing handwriting.” The young woman appeared unflinchingly serious. She believed in handwriting analysis? Sam restrained an impulse to roll his eyes.
“Even though the subject uses printing instead of cursive, because printing reveals less,” she elaborated. “But still, any individual who prints this large has to be egotistic, if not a megalomaniac. And look at the way he ignores the lines, like saying rules don’t apply to him. No margins for this guy. He squeezes words to the very edge. No foresight, no impulse control. But what’s really concerning—”
Sam interrupted, “Officer, um, Chappell, does this have anything to do with finding my wife?”
“I’ll put out a BOLO on your wife and her vehicle right away.” Slipping the squares of notebook paper into the pink folder under her arm, the police officer stood with pen and steno pad poised. “Make, model, color, license?”
Sam recited the information. Probably Dorrie didn’t know her own license plate number, but he did. He reeled it off.
“Do you know what your wife was wearing?”
“Um, almost certainly a dress like one of those in the closet.”
“Description of your wife?”
“Um, she has beautiful eyes—”
“Height? Weight? Identifying marks or scars?”
Sam sighed. “Five foot five, about a hundred ninety pounds. She has what they call a malar or butterfly rash on her face.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Butterfly rash. They call it that because it makes a pattern kind of like butterfly wings on her face. She has lupus. She had to take steroids, and they gave her puffy cheeks. And fatty deposits on her midsection.”
“Lupus?”
And so on. Eventually the young policewoman put her notes away and inquired again about Dorrie’s computer. When Sam led her to it, she immediately packed it into its case, included the squares of notebook paper and the pink folder, and asked in a perfunctory way, “May I take these with me?”
Now all of a sudden things were moving too fast, and Sam found himself wishing Officer Chappell would revert to her earlier plodding pace. He felt his voice rise as he said, “Those are private things of Dorrie’s. I’d rather you didn’t.”
The young woman replied with an earnest look, “I think they’re important. If I have to get a warrant and return for them, it will waste time I could spend trying to find your wife.”
Having been raised never to swear left Sam with very little recourse to vent his feelings. Not trusting himself to speak, he raised his hands in a frustrated gesture that the rookie policewoman rightly interpreted as capitulation.
“I’ll get on this right away.” Swinging the computer case the way an excited child swung a book bag, she added, “One more thing. Could I have a recent photograph of your wife?”
“Um . . .”
Officer Chappell stared at him, puzzled, as if it should have been the easiest thing in the world for him to produce a photo of Dorrie.
“Um, I guess she’s kind of camera shy,” Sam said slowly, trying to explain to her as well as to himself why there weren’t any recent photos of Dorrie in the house. “And we aren’t the kind to go snapping away with cell phones.” Neither of them had a cell phone that did anything except phone. “I might be able to get a photo of her from somebody else.”
“Please do. As soon as possible.” After frowning at him for a moment, either in thought or disapproval, Officer Chappell ran downstairs and out the door.
Sam flicked off the upstairs lights, descended the stairs more slowly, sat on the edge of the sofa, and cradled his head in his hands for a moment before reaching for the phone.
SIX
“Run!” I screamed again. “Juliet, run! Get away!”
She’d flung the van door open but seemed to be struggling to get out of her seat.
Flicking my flashlight on, I hustl
ed around there to see what was the problem.
At my first sight of her sweating, straining face, her frightened eyes . . . But there was no time for anything I was feeling.
“He’s got the seat belt rigged to lock.” Like a wounded deer she looked up at me, hair coming undone and hanging in her face, the whites of her eyes flashing. “I can’t get out.”
“Oh, God . . .” I handed her the flashlight, groped for my purse, and yes, it was still there hanging from my arm; it had come along with me like an appendage of an appendage. I ripped it open and started rooting like a bear, hoping for something, anything, a nail file maybe, that could cut through a seat belt. Wallet, tube of sunscreen, address book, appointment book, checkbook, Tylenol, paste foundation to tone down the rash on my face, lupus meds, ballpoint pens, coupon folder, roll of Tums, loose change—why did I have to be so asininely afraid of knives that I kept “losing” the cute little penknives Sam kept giving me? Damn, there had to be something—
Silence fell like a guillotine as the tire pump stopped.
And in the silence I could hear someone moving on the other side of the van. Him.
Boots scuffed in gravel. Through the windows of the van I saw him struggling to his feet. I’d hit him as hard as I could, but it hadn’t been hard enough.
“You go,” Juliet whispered to me frantically. “Go, run, hurry, get help.”
I shook my head. “No way am I leaving you.” I took the flashlight back and wrenched open the sliding side door of the van, looking for the heavy wooden cane with which the abductor had clubbed Juliet over the head, but I saw no sign of it.
Footsteps crunched toward me.
I heaved myself into the van.
Lurching onto the rear seat, I didn’t stop there; it would be too easy for him to reach in and dislodge me. I slid on over, then down, to the floor, stuffing my large self sideward behind the driver’s seat, with my back against the van’s wall. I turned the flashlight off and hid it behind my butt. Darkness would be better; I did not want him to see me trembling.
Dark Lie (9781101607084) Page 8
