Dark Lie (9781101607084)

by Springer, Nancy;

  He terrified me. I didn’t want to go into that room. Not at all.

  Only my pride and a desperate plan made me do it.

  I clenched my jaw, straightened my shoulders, and stepped into the bathroom. Flicking the light on, I closed the heavy oak door behind me. And from the other side I heard the bolt snick.

  Oh, God, I’d left Juliet alone with Him. What if He took her and—

  Don’t dither. Act.

  I blundered into one of the two tall old wooden stalls. This must have been a private bathroom for the librarians, smaller than the upstairs restroom I remembered using as a child, although every bit as ugly: the same bilious green paint, and no window except a tiny one at the very top of the wall, boarded over from outside. Way out of my reach anyhow. Why had they made the ceilings so darn high in these old buildings, even in the basement?

  This room, like the other one, must have been lightproof. Or else He figured that nobody would notice a little light seeping around the plywood covering the window, not in the daylight. If it really was daylight. If He hadn’t been lying to us, playing mind games with us.

  No wonder I felt surreal, like I was swimming in a fever dream, half-crazy, not knowing whether it was day or night or what time it was. I wished I had my wristwatch.

  I wished . . . so many things I wished. I wished I’d lived more and worried less. I wished I’d been able to have children. I wished I’d gotten to know my husband better. Sam was a truly good guy. I wished I’d told him more, trusted him more. What had seemed like “sparing him” at the time now looked like cowardice. If he found out things about me after I died, he was going to be terribly hurt.

  Sam, I’m sorry. . . .

  Once again I made myself stop thinking of him, because I had to keep my mind on staying alive, and keeping Juliet alive, one minute at a time. Sitting on the toilet, I made myself hurry up and use it, all the time listening for—I don’t know. Voices cursing, or shouting, or screaming.

  But I heard nothing.

  I stood up, adjusted my clothing, flushed. Out of the stall, I turned on the water at the sink so it would sound like I was washing my hands. Actually, I was sticking my face under the spigot to gulp a hasty drink. And at the same time I was emptying the pockets of the coat Juliet had handed back to me: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a can of beer, some wads of Kleenex. Good.

  Finished with my drink, I stepped back into the stall, took Juliet’s PB&J first and used the beer can to ram it down the toilet, then followed up with the aforementioned can and the wads of Kleenex. Plugging things, such as the van’s tailpipe, seemed to be my new forte. Adding a generous handful of toilet paper, I plugged that toilet very quickly and, I hoped, very well.

  “What the hell is taking you so long?” demanded a harsh voice outside the door.

  Good. Good, He was right there, not back in that horrible room, not—not doing anything to Juliet.

  I called, “Coming.”

  “Get your filthy ass moving.”

  I tucked the ends of the wet TP out of sight in the bowels of the toilet, then stood up and took one more look. Nothing showed. Good job. I didn’t want this toilet to look like a mess. I wanted Juliet to use it.

  The knife-edged voice outside the door shouted, “Move, bitch, or I’m coming in!”

  There wasn’t time to mess up the other stall.

  But what if Juliet used the wrong toilet?

  I left my coat draped over the stall door of the one I’d tampered with. I felt sure Juliet would notice. She would head for that stall to get the coat back. But whether she would sense a signal, I had no way of knowing.

  Turning off the sink faucet, drying my hands on my skirt for lack of a better option, I reached the door just as it banged open and, knife raised, the abductor scowled in at me.

  I let my gaze slide right over His glare to focus on Juliet instead.

  “Next,” I told her, looking her intently in the face, trying to tell her without words, Use the stall with the coat.

  He closed the door behind her and bolted it, all the time keeping His knife at the ready and His eyes stonily on me. I could see Him all too well now that electric light poured out over top of the bathroom door, through the transom.

  “What took you so long in there?” He demanded.

  “It takes women longer,” I informed Him in teacherly tones, “especially after we get to a certain age.” Mentally I prayed, Juliet, the one with the coat, and hurry.

  “Bullshit. You were up to something. I can see it in your ugly face.” He balanced His knife on its thick black handle in the palm of His hand. There it stood with its blade up like a silver flame of hell. Even in my worst paranoia—and I’d been entertaining a morbid phobia of knives for a long time—even in my worst nightmares, I never would have imagined there were so many ways to scare a person with a knife. This man and His dear Pandora had threatened me a dozen times a dozen different ways and each one intimidated me more. Or maybe it was His stony-flat crazy glare, or the way He lowered His head like a stallion closing in on a filly. I started to sweat.

  He said, “I want to know what you—”

  I heard the watery whoosh of a toilet flushing, and then Juliet shrieked. And bless her, she flushed it again, and kept screaming hysterically. “Let me out! It’s going everywhere. It’s going to get on me. Let me out!” I heard her throw herself against the inside of the door, pounding with her fists, so frenzied she scared me, and I had been expecting something of the sort.

  “What the—” Our captor lunged for the bolt.

  With His back to me.

  He flung open the door. With my coat clutched around her, Juliet darted out of the bathroom like a cat spritzed by a sprinkler.

  And as He peered in there to see what the problem was, I shoved Him from behind as hard as I could.

  * * *

  Sitting on a cold folding metal chair in the bulky cop’s cubicle, Sam informed him that Appletree was Dorrie’s hometown. He couldn’t believe the big, obnoxious jerk—what was his name? He couldn’t believe Walker hadn’t known. Only then did Sam realize that probably the Fulcrum police hadn’t informed the FBI of the significance of Appletree either, or hadn’t known themselves, and he wished somebody had taught him how to swear.

  Instead, he answered too many questions he’d already been asked before. Additionally, he gave a description of the missing flashlight. The craggy old cop, who apparently functioned as a gofer, brought coffee. Sam drank his. Yeah, the brew tasted not quite as gruesome when loaded with cream and sugar, but it didn’t cut through his fatigue as much as he’d hoped. He still felt as if he were trying to conduct business underwater.

  He told the Walker cop—one of those people too legendary in their own mind to use a first name—“I want to see where you found Dorrie’s car.”

  “This isn’t Fulcrum, Mr. White. The Appletree police department consists pretty much of me, myself, and I, and now the FBI is going to be all over me like flies on a rump roast—”

  “I’m not asking you to take me.” Sam tried to keep his voice under control. “I just—”

  “What I’m saying is, I have to stay put waiting until the FBI gets here, and I can’t spare anyone to take you.”

  “So just tell me where it is and how I get there!”

  “It’s a crime scene. Restricted access. Sorry.”

  A gravelly voice said, “I’ll take him.” The venerable cop who had brought the coffee still stood in the doorway.

  “Bert, now, think,” Walker complained before Sam could say thanks. “In what vehicle? I don’t have a vehicle to spare any more than I have a man to spare.”

  “You can spare me. I’m just deadweight left over from the previous administration. You can’t wait till I retire. Anyway, I’m on my six-in-the-morning lunch break.” Bert turned to Sam w
ith twinkling eyes that didn’t look sleepy at all. “We’ll have to go in your truck.”

  “That’s fine! Thank you, um . . .” Sam glanced at his name tag, wanting to thank the nice old guy by his proper name and title. But the plastic pseudo-metal tag was so worn and faded he couldn’t read it. It had probably been on the job as long as this cop. Definitely it was ready to retire.

  “No, it’s not fine,” snapped Walker. “It isn’t regulation.”

  “Well, we’re going anyway.”

  Walker growled something worth ignoring. As Sam mentally counted to ten, the old officer escorted him out of the station.

  Crossing the parking lot, Sam handed him the keys. “You drive.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. You don’t want me driving. I’ve been up all night.”

  As the old cop chauffeured him through Appletree, Sam leaned back and closed his burning eyes, feeling nerves firing and muscles jumping in his legs.

  “I been trying to remember your wife,” said the old cop. “Her maiden name was Birch? I recall a Douglas Birch, used to run a used-car lot—”

  Sam shook his head. “No relation.” Sam felt too tired to explain that Dorrie’s family, like other members of their religious sect, had kept very much to themselves, even to the point of ordering their household goods wholesale and growing their own meat and vegetables.

  “Not Catholic, huh?” Receiving no response, the old man added, “Was her mother a Miller? I seem to recall one of the Miller girls married some guy from out of state, might have been Birch—”

  “No.” Sam’s mind and mouth felt too sluggish to vouchsafe Dorrie’s mother’s maiden name, but he did manage to open his eyes. “Thank you.”

  The old man gave him a puzzled glance. “Thank me for what?”

  The reason seemed obvious to Sam at the time. “For trying to remember her.”

  The old cop shrugged. “I got a good memory for people. It bothers me that I can’t place her.”

  If Dorrie was dead, who was going to remember her? Me. Three friends. And her parents. Barely.

  Sam turned and stared out his window so the old man would not see his blinking eyes.

  The car stopped in the roadway and Bert said, “Here’s the FBI’s so-called crime scene.”

  Sam looked where Bert was pointing, out the driver’s side window at the corner across the street. The “restricted area” was just an expanse of disintegrating concrete sidewalk cordoned off with yellow police tape—inconveniently for pedestrians, who had to walk in the street to get past. A couple of old men were doing just that, shuffling along the asphalt, eyeing the empty sidewalk. A massive, bored-looking woman in a police uniform stood guard with her back against the corner building, which still read WILSON UMBRELLA REPAIR in faded gold paint on the window. How long had it been since anybody repaired umbrellas?

  “Car was right up on the sidewalk by the phone booth,” Bert said, rolling down his window and waving at a vehicle behind him to drive past.

  Sam saw the pay phone, though he wouldn’t have called that box on a post a booth. He saw a newspaper vending machine. He saw the old guys walking past. He saw the guard. None of this helped him.

  He admitted, “I don’t know what I expected to accomplish here.”

  “Well, let’s have a closer look.” Bert flicked the left blinker on, waited for a break in traffic, then turned into the narrow side street that ran beside the public phone. Past the first building he swung right into a gravel parking lot, where he stopped the Silverado. Turning it off, he got out.

  Sam trudged after him, only marginally aware of the few other vehicles parked in the gravel lot, then the derelict building to his left as he headed diagonally across the street. Abandoned buildings made him feel depressed, the mess people made of them, breaking windows so they had to be boarded up with plywood, scrawling graffiti. . . . Sure enough, he saw graffiti printed on the concrete basement wall of this structure, but he turned his bleary gaze away.

  He and Bert stepped up the curb and stopped at the yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape. “Hey, Paula,” Bert said to the guard.

  “Hey, Bert.” She barely looked at him.

  “This is Mr. White.”

  “Niceta meetcha.” She barely looked at Sam either. Sam took this as permission to pretend she wasn’t there.

  So did Bert, apparently, turning back to Sam. “Your wife’s car was thereabouts,” he told him, sketching the positioning of the Kia with both hands swinging in air. “Like so, pointed thataway.”

  “How the heck did it get up here on the sidewalk?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Three times now Sam had heard Bert’s gravelly voice say those words. He didn’t like them. But he did like Bert’s honesty. With mixed feelings he grumbled, “Well, at least you’ll admit it.”

  “First thing I learned as a cop. Know when you don’t know.”

  Sam stared at the cracks in the sidewalk. They told him nothing. He asked, “Is there anything we do know?”

  “We know your wife’s car was here. We presume she left it. But nobody’s seen her that we’ve talked to. We knocked on doors for a block in every direction last night. Now the FBI’s come in, they’ll probably do it again.”

  “They’re here?”

  “Heard it on the radio a little while back.”

  “Where are they? What are they doing?”

  He noticed that the impassive guard actually rolled her eyes, although she still didn’t look at him.

  The craggy old cop replied without expression, “They didn’t consult me, but I can imagine. They’re checking the bus station. Trying to get hold of the management of the local so-called airport and the guy who runs the taxi. Checking reports of stolen cars. Trying to figure where she went with the girl when her car failed.”

  Sam burst out, “Dorrie is not a kidnapper! Why can’t they get that through their heads?”

  “They got hold of this thing by that end and—”

  “But that’s asinine! How did her car get so messed up? And why would she drive it over the curb and leave it on the corner?”

  The old cop’s scratchy voice kept getting lower. “Gotta admit it doesn’t make much sense to me either.” Bert paused, then added gently, “Unless maybe somebody forced her off the road.”

  Oh, God. Sam’s breath stopped.

  God, that was it. He’d grabbed her. The real kidnapper. The guy who had abducted the Phillips girl. The guy Dorrie was pursuing.

  “No!” Explosively, Sam regained his breath. “No, that can’t be it.” Shaking his head doggedly, Sam faced the gray-haired cop. “I mean, yes, it’s a possibility, but there has to be some other . . .” Sam’s frantic gaze caught on the pay phone. “Something happened to her phone. Maybe she wanted to use this one.”

  “She could have just parked across the way like we did.”

  Amazingly, the woman standing guard spoke. “That phone don’t work. Hasn’t worked for months.”

  “Oh, for the love of mercy . . .” Scanning desperately, Sam focused on the boarded-up building across the street. He pointed. “Have you looked for her in there?”

  “The old library?” Bert eyed it, chewing on his lower lip. “You’d practically need dynamite to get in there, they’ve got the old place sealed up so tight. The guys checked around, saw no signs of forcible entry.”

  “So nobody could have gotten in there.”

  “Nope. There’s no access.”

  TEN

  Yelling at Juliet, “Get the door!” I shoved our captor with all my might into the bathroom.

  All my might doesn’t amount to much, because lupus sabotages muscle tissue and also because, heck, I never had much upper-body strength to start with. Plus, this—this evil man whose name I knew but couldn’t bear to
acknowledge—He was solid. I didn’t send Him flying. He took only one stumbling step inside the bathroom doorway before He turned on me with the knife, the white-hot fury in His face so incandescent it immobilized me. His uplifted knife might as well have been a sword of fire. Silver fire with a name. Pandora. Mother of all evil. In a moment I would die—

  “Bitch!” He screamed, lunging to stab me.

  And He slipped in the water under His feet.

  He fell.

  Whump. With a splash, on His face in the water running over the floor. His knife flew into a corner. I heard His head hit the tile with a goodly whack.

  And Juliet slammed the door just as I regained my wits and started to reach for it. I jammed the heavy bolt into place.

  Juliet flung herself onto me, sobbing, arms around me in a tight hug.

  My daughter. Hugging me.

  Nothing had ever felt so good. And nothing had ever given me so much strength. In that moment I could have done anything. Anything. And would have, for her.

  I patted her heaving shoulders. “We’re not out of here yet, sweetie. Come on.” Already I heard Him stirring, swearing, floundering on the other side of the bolted door.

  She heard too, and turned me loose. Grabbing her hand, I ran up the hallway to the back stairwell.

  Her clunky shoes thunked, my sneakers thudded, echoes flew like bats in the darkness. We could see only dimly as we left the light from the bathroom transom behind us. We actually slammed into the barrier before we saw it.

  “Ow!”

  A wall rose where the doorway to the stairwell should have been.

  A crude wall made of scrap lumber solidly screwed or nailed in place.

  In that moment I knew we were still trapped.

  We had to find a way out.

  “About-face,” I tried to joke. We ran back past the bathroom, braving a nightmare clamor of pounding fists and barely human shouts. It was like dodging past the faceless monster in a very bad dream. Wincing, flinching, we ran away from threats distorted almost beyond understanding by rage.