Drew quickly walked back to his BMW and slowly pulled it partway up the empty driveway, grimacing with each popping sound created by the gravel underneath the weight of his car. If anyone was at his mom’s home waiting for him, he hoped the noise hadn’t just given him away; the darkness always seemed to amplify even the softest of sounds.
Leaving his car behind, he walked down the street, turned left, and worked his way through the serpentine tunnel of trees, inching his way forward until he was able to see the house.
There were no cars and no people. The lights were out. Not a sign of life.
He sighed with relief.
Drew straightened himself and departed the dark canopy of limbs and leaves.
Reaching the top of the front porch, he opened the screen door and, out of an abundance of caution, laid his ear upon the door to listen for a moment.
Silence.
He inserted his key and walked in.
Pulling his phone from the phone clip on his left hip, he turned on the flashlight app so that he could see his way down the stairs to the basement.
Drew heard a muffled moan—a moan coupled with weeping.
He stopped, stood, and listened.
His heart softened a bit for the sad girl behind the padlocked door. What was he going to do with her?
He wished there was a means for extricating himself and her from the terrifying scenario that was playing out … a way to buy tickets, drive to an airport, and just fly away to Aruba.
He’d always wanted to see Aruba. And it would be indescribably wonderful to spend time there with the beautiful brown-haired girl in the darkroom ahead of him.
It couldn’t happen, though.
He’d tried desperately to develop an escape scenario for them during his final few minutes driving to the house. Nothing seemed feasible.
He hadn’t figured on getting trapped by whatever flaw in his story had exposed his deception to Elizabeth. He thought he’d planned and executed everything perfectly.
But now he was probably being tracked down, because someone, somehow had gotten the number to his second cell phone. He couldn’t figure that one out. The only number he’d called with that phone was Elizabeth’s. Had she somehow passed it on to someone else?
Drew didn’t like how it sounded in his head, but the truth was that Elizabeth had become a liability. She was a breathtakingly sexy piece of evidence against him. And if he couldn’t convince her that it was in her best interest to defend his actions to anyone now looking for him, he might have to eliminate that liability, regardless of how pretty and softhearted it was.
The very idea made him squeamish. He wasn’t a killer; he was a code writer.
But he was also someone who could not go to prison.
How could things have gotten so out of control? How could a decision to have a one-time sexual encounter with a girl, who was herself purposely enticing men with her body, become something that put his personal freedom on the line?
And she was equally at fault in all of this! Maybe more! If she hadn’t been online, flaunting herself, he wouldn’t have made a single move to find her.
She tempted him! She had purposely inflamed his desire!
Drew walked down the hall to the door that led to the basement and flipped the light switch, illuminating the staircase and the room below. He started down the steps.
Not knowing what Elizabeth’s reaction would be once he reached and opened the darkroom door, he tensed. Now standing before it, he took in and released a deep breath, then rapped on the metal surface with his middle knuckle.
“Drew?” The voice sounded sad and defeated. The lone syllable of his name said so much. And just that quickly, his ire toward her simmered down.
“Yeah, it’s me. Hold on.”
He withdrew the key from his pocket and removed the lock. He slowly opened the door and found Elizabeth sitting in the chair at the left side of the table. Her face was turned toward the door, tear streams made evident by the outside light. He recognized an additional scent escaping the room.
She’d been forced to pee herself. Now he felt sorry for her again.
There was no malice in her eyes or facial expression. Instead, she looked at him with.…
What was the look? Pity?
A flash of anger. Pity? Really? He didn’t need nor want any of her pity.
He was suddenly startled, then overrun, by a rapid conjuring of hostility within him. Extreme emotion attacked his mind—an uncontrollable, ugly hatred.
“She’s the one who should be punished,” his inner voice growled.
Drew gasped. And as he did, he had the alarming sensation that something supremely intelligent and vile was slipping into him.
He couldn’t move. His flash of anger subsided, replaced with distress. What was happening? The pain in his shoulder disappeared, but he couldn’t move his arm. He couldn’t control either of them! He couldn’t even open his mouth to speak.
He was literally paralyzed.
His emotional shift—from compassion toward Elizabeth to hating every molecule of her being—flew in the face of who he was as a man.
Hellish thoughts were injected into the forefront of his mind without any effort on his part; he found himself incapable of a single self-directed thought, though he was still oddly aware of everything that was happening in and around him.
His eyes involuntarily zeroed in on Elizabeth.
“That female bag of dirt!”
The intensity of the unwanted thought scared him. The surge of rage terrified him.
He couldn’t remember ever being filled with hate like this before!
Maybe a half minute had passed from the time he’d opened the darkroom door, but in those few seconds, he’d violently transitioned from caring about her wellbeing to having an ardent disgust for her very existence.
He hated her!
“Drew? Say something.”
Chapter 76
D
rew.” Elizabeth repeated. “Say something.”
The look on his face was beginning to scare her. He’d become livid, and it appeared that he was angry with her.
“This is your fault,” he spat.
Mine? How did—
“You were online, playing me. You led me to believe that you were eighteen years old!”
It was true. She’d been deceiving everyone about her real age for years. Attempting to, anyway.
“You lied to me.”
He took a step toward the table, the red light above forming malevolent-looking shadows around his eyes and mouth.
Instinctively, Elizabeth pushed the chair back with her left leg, her right heel dragging on the floor. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her neck and temples.
“Drew, you’re scaring me.”
“You should be scared, girl. If I go down for this, I’m exposing you to the world. That family that’s adopting you … that cop … they’re all going to find out about the life you’ve been hiding from them.”
The thought of that revelation was as frightening to her as Drew was now.
“Drew, please,” she said, her voice trembling, “let’s talk about this.”
“Talk about what? They’re after me. They’ll find out about you. What’s left to discuss?”
He rounded the table and stood directly in front of her, ten feet separating them.
She needed solutions, not the panic that was beginning to rise within her.
The beautiful man, who had once been Mark, had become a demon. She nearly thought it could be literal. Shrouded in red, he looked almost otherworldly.
Again, her mouth betrayed her desire and hope. “Mark, please be mine again.”
She felt hot tears sliding down her cheeks again.
“Mark? You want Mark?! I’m sorry, honey, but you’ve got the real deal now, and I’m not nearly as emotionally balanced.”
She’d gotten to know both men, f
ake and real. And she knew that both of them were, for the most part, reasonable. The Drew she knew had only wanted to find a feasible way out of the situation so that both of them could walk away unscathed.
“Drew,” she began, realizing she was now grasping at straws, “we don’t even know for sure that anyone is looking. You know? We’re probably just being paranoid. We can still make up a story—figure one out. You’re smart like that.”
“It’s too late for that, dearie,” he said with an impressive-sounding Scottish accent.
Elizabeth caught the reference. He was imitating Mr. Gold, a.k.a. Rumpelstiltskin, from the TV show Once Upon a Time, a favorite of hers.
“You see,” he continued in character, “someone called my phone. Now who do you think that might have been? Hmm?”
“Your phone? Anyone. It could have been anyone,” she said, not understanding.
He dropped the accent. “No! It couldn’t have been just anyone! You were the only one I gave that number to.”
It took a moment for Elizabeth to process that, but she realized that couldn’t be true.
“But the girl from the … umm … you know, from New York.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, a sly smirk playing on his lips. “The girl from New York. I’m good, aren’t I? A press of a button on one of my phones rang the other. Not exactly genius, but it worked.”
I was tricked.
Of course she’d been tricked! Why hadn’t it sunk in yet? She should have known that from the moment Mark turned out to be an impostor.
A moment—a split second—of brash courage presented itself in her next few words. “You played me too, Mark!” She made sure to put all the emphasis she could on the name. If he wanted to lay blame, she could play that game too.
A grin came upon Drew’s face. Not the happy kind.
“A little tit for tat, is it? Little girl, you don’t know who you’re even dealing with right now.”
“You are Drew Parks, son of Willard and Darlene Parks.”
Drew gave her a silent, chilling stare.
It petrified her to her core. That’s when Elizabeth recognized the beginnings of another unwanted fainting spell. The last thing she heard before Drew and the red light diminished to darkness were the words, “You have no idea who I am, child of dirt.”
“THERE! JENNA, STOP!”
Jenna hit the brakes a little too hard, causing both of them to feel the shock of the seat belts restraining their forward motion.
“Back up a little bit,” Jamie said.
Jenna did as she was directed.
“There it is. The BMW.”
Jamie didn’t know if he should feel happy or scared. When Jenna looked at him, he could tell she wasn’t at all happy.
“Okay, let’s call Dad,” she said.
“We will. But we’ve got to make sure. I don’t know the license plate. What if we got Dad out here and it isn’t even the right car?”
“Jamie, come on. This is getting scary.”
“Yeah, I know. Trust me.”
He opened his door.
“What are you doing?” demanded his sister.
“Well, I can’t tell if I’m right about the car by just sitting here, now, can I? You coming?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll be back.”
Jamie exited the car and walked around it to cross the street. He heard Jenna’s door open, causing him to stop midway across the road.
She closed her door and jogged up to him. “I can’t stay in there alone.”
He turned back and walked to the parked BMW at the end of the driveway.
“Why is it parked way back here?” Jenna asked.
“Good question.”
Jamie walked to the passenger side to see if there were at least two envelopes on the seat. There weren’t.
“Can you see anything on the driver’s side?” he asked.
Jenna left his side to walk around the vehicle. “It’s hard to see, but I don’t see anything helpful.”
“Here goes nothing,” he said to himself.
“Here goes what?” Jenna obviously didn’t like the sound of what he’d said.
“Gonna try the door.”
“Jamie, no!” she said in a strained whisper. “The alarm!”
“Just going to lift the handle one time. If it doesn’t open, we walk away.”
Jamie hoped he knew what he was doing. He couldn’t remember anybody’s car alarm ever going off with a simple attempt to open a door.
He swallowed hard and lifted.
He was relieved when he both felt and heard the latch give way. He slowly pulled the door open.
He looked through the car to Jenna, who was, again, looking inside via the driver’s window, her right thumbnail between her lips and teeth. She looked very uneasy about what he was doing.
He grabbed his pocket-sized flashlight and pointed it into the vehicle. Inside, it was fairly clean. He looked closely at the floor, then pulled the seat lever to allow the seat back to fold forward. The backseat was empty too.
Jamie pushed the seat back into its upright position.
Let’s try the glove compartment.
Immediately upon opening it, he saw what he’d been seeking. Pulling the white envelope out, he immediately recognized the two numbers he’d seen before. He’d nailed it with his guess on the location.
He pushed himself up and out of the car. “Found it!” he said, maybe a little too loud.
Jenna came back to his side of the car. He handed her the envelope.
“You’ve got a good mind for remembering things, I’ll give you that,” she said. “Now let’s call Dad.”
“Hold on a sec,” he said.
The look on Jenna’s face made it unquestionably clear that she was perturbed by his response.
Jamie asked for the envelope back and looked at the address again. Giving it back to her, he said, “Wait here.”
“What?! Where are you going?” Jenna questioned desperately.
Jamie jogged up the driveway, hugging the tree line. He had to find out if the street number on the envelope actually matched that of the house.
Once he was even with the house, he quickly walked across the gravel drive and to the front of the house. The house number had become partially hidden by an overgrown bush.
It’s not the right house. Then why is the car parked here?
Jamie jogged easily across the lawn, no longer concerned about being seen.
“It’s not the right place.”
“Why?”
Jamie gave her a look.
“Why do you say that?”
“Wrong house number. Maybe it’s the next house up.”
“Maybe Dad should come to check that out, then.”
“Jenna, let me just check one more thing. You can wait at the car.”
“Jamie! Listen to me! You are not a detective. You are not a police officer. You’re a high school student!”
Somehow, even in the midst of the current, tense situation, Jenna’s comment was funny. He couldn’t help but laugh.
“Yeah. A high school student who’s here while Dad is quite a few miles away.”
Jenna pulled out her phone. “I’m calling him.”
“Wait, Jenna. Just wait a few minutes. Then you can call him.”
Jenna clenched her jaw. “So help me, Jamie, if we get killed.…”
He smiled and headed for her car.
Jenna drove them up to the next mailbox on the street. There was what appeared to be a driveway entrance, but it curved into the trees and disappeared.
Jamie didn’t like the look of it, but he was determined to find the exact location.
Both he and Jenna got out of the car. Jamie crossed the street and walked cautiously up to the drive entrance.
“Jamie, it’s the right address.”
He turned back. She was on the passenger side of her car … by
the mailbox.
Oh. Guess that was the easiest way to find out.
“Great,” he quietly called back. “Call Dad.”
Even from more than twenty feet, he could see the look of relief on her face.
Jamie turned back around. He wanted to see what was on the other side of the trees.
Chapter 77
W
hen Elizabeth woke up, she found herself back on Drew’s upstairs bed, on top of the covers.
She was startled to see that Drew was sitting in the lone chair in the room, staring at her, seemingly without a care in the world.
“Have a good five-minute rest?”
Elizabeth kept her eyes fastened on him and silently pushed herself up into a sitting position against the headboard.
Why’d he bring me back up here? Is he going to…. She swallowed.
“I thought maybe you and Drew could have some fun together. I know he’d appreciate that, being the reprobate that he is.”
She didn’t know what to say. Drew was speaking about himself as if he wasn’t in the same room with her. Something was wrong with him. Something more than before.
“You and I met before, Elizabeth. Before you were actually born. Of course, I didn’t know that back then.”
Met me before? Before I was born? What is he talking about?
“The enemy had tricked me, you see. Made me believe that I was truly manipulating you and your circumstances. The whole while having to deal with that troublesome younger version of your ‘dad.’” He overly dramatized his finger quotes.
“Drew, you’re not making any sen—”
Oh God. Yes, he is making sense.
Drew laughed. Except it wasn’t really Drew, was it?
“Aha! A light bulb just turned on!”
Elizabeth wanted to run. She couldn’t, though. Her leg wouldn’t allow for that. She looked around her for something she could grab. Something that could be used for self-defense.
“Doesn’t matter, child of dirt. Even if you had a gun.…” The demon laughed. “You remember the gun, don’t you Elizabeth? The one you used to blow the back of your skull off?”
No, I don’t remember. It … it wasn’t me.
“It was a dream,” she managed weakly.
That Dark Place Page 43
