The Two Lila Bennetts

by Fenton, Liz

  “If you fight me after I take these off, it will be the last time I do . . . and the last time you do,” he says, his voice dropping an octave. He cuts the ties on my ankles, and they start tingling, the blood circulating again. He pulls me up by the wrists, and I wince as the handcuffs cut into my skin.

  He shuffles me toward the door, then stops abruptly and looks at me. He leans in, and I feel his mouth on my ear. “Don’t worry, you aren’t my type. Too skinny,” he adds.

  He leads me down a dark hallway and to a closed door that must be the bathroom. “I’m going to remove these cuffs now, because I don’t get paid enough to wipe your ass.” He pulls out his knife again. “But I promise you, if you try something, you will regret it, Lila. Do you understand?”

  I nod, too terrified to speak.

  “Good girl,” he says and unlocks the cuffs.

  This is my chance. I could kick him in the balls and run. But where? What if there isn’t a way out of here? And then what?

  He removes them, and tears of relief well in my eyes as circulation begins to return in my fingers. I look down at my wrists; they are raw and red. I rub them, realizing I’m not going anywhere. Not yet. It would be stupid to blow my only chance at getting away.

  “You have two minutes.” He gives me a small push toward the door.

  I open it and close it behind me. The room is dark, save for a dim bulb similar to the one in my room. My eyes adjust, and I take in my surroundings. A dirty toilet in the right corner, a roll of toilet paper on the floor beside it. A filthy sink with exposed rusted pipes underneath it. No window. No way out.

  My legs still shake slightly as I make my way over and pull my skirt up, my thighs burning as I squat. I’m trembling as I try to pee, the reality of where I am—in this filthy bathroom, God knows where—smacking me in the face. I’m crying suddenly, wanting my mom so desperately I can’t breathe. Thinking, of all things, of an article she quoted from BuzzFeed about cell phones being as full of germs as toilet seats. I was barely listening, scanning a brief on my desk while she chattered on. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to her when she called? I wonder if she’s already trying to track me down. She calls almost every day—and when she doesn’t reach me, she hunts. Something that normally irritates me but makes me hopeful now.

  I pray she’ll stalk the detective in charge of my case, and if the cop tries in vain to stonewall her, she’ll push harder. Most detectives despise me, as I often get acquitted the people they arrest. But my mom will get them to succumb to her persistence. She has that personality—convinces you to do what she wants even if you think it’s an insane idea. She once talked me into buying a pale-pink romper at H&M—a store I’d never set foot in before. There’s a picture of me modeling it for her in the dressing room, my skin glowing under the fluorescent lights. I’ve still yet to wear it out, but every time I see it in my closet, it makes me smile. So maybe, just maybe, she’ll be able to make the detectives believe that I’m the type of woman who deserves to be found alive. The thought hits me hard, and the tears fall again.

  A bang. I jump. I grab the wall to steady myself.

  “You done?” Q’s voice barrels through the door. “I was nice, gave you an extra minute.”

  “Yes,” I call out, reaching for the toilet paper, wiping quickly and pulling up my skirt.

  Suddenly something Q said earlier hits me as the door swings open. I don’t get paid enough to wipe your ass.

  So he’s not working alone. He was hired by someone.

  “Let’s go,” he says, still holding the knife in his right hand, grabbing my arm with the other. We walk slowly and silently down the hall, me counting the steps back to my prison, my mind working in overdrive to figure out who hired Q.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MONDAY

  FREE

  “I’m home!” I say when I walk through the door. I’m met with silence. I toss my keys in the dish on the table. “Ethan?” I slip off my shoes, studying myself in the mirror on the wall. I look tired. A little sad. I pinch my cheeks, run my fingers through my hair, and walk around the corner to look for Ethan.

  “Hey,” Ethan says, pausing the TV but not rising from the couch. He looks over, his expression hard to read. “Started without you.” He points the remote toward the frozen image of Julianna Margulies’s face.

  I glance at my watch. It’s after eight.

  “Sorry I’m late. Had a little trouble getting out of there,” I say, trying to lighten the mood in the room.

  He puts his hand up. “Not tonight, okay?”

  My chest tightens. I’ve ruined it. His one-week streak. Why did I linger in the garage with Sam? Especially since I had already been running late to get home to Ethan? I study my husband, obviously fresh out of the shower. His sandy-blond hair is still wet, making it look darker than it is. He’s wearing faded jeans and a pale-gray T-shirt, wet in some places from where he didn’t dry his torso. The Mongolian beef and wontons sit untouched on the coffee table. Two glasses. An unopened bottle of wine. He sat here. He waited.

  I walk closer to him. “I’m sorry. Let me make it up to you.”

  Ethan sighs, his eyes flinty.

  I reach for him, and he moves away. “I know you’re sorry. You must tell me weekly. But why isn’t it important for you to be here?”

  He’s not asking me where I really was, yet he is. His eyes are searching mine. Was it really that hard to get out of the office? Or did I choose work (and ultimately Sam) over him again?

  Or maybe that’s my guilt talking.

  “It is important. No more late nights. I promise. It was a big win today. Things should calm down now.”

  His shoulders relax slightly, and I breathe. “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  I move toward him again, and this time he doesn’t step back. I wrap my arms around his waist, lean my cheek on his shoulder. “I won’t,” I whisper. And I hope I’m telling the truth. That the little voice inside me that I hear chanting, Oh yes you will, is wrong.

  “Subject change?” Ethan says abruptly. But I’m used to how he pivots. Tense one moment, seemingly fine the next.

  “Please,” I say.

  “I wrote three thousand words today.”

  “That’s great.” I try to remember the last time he wrote any words. I can’t. Usually he sits, laptop open, fingers poised, but nothing.

  “I was feeling it, you know? I went for a run on the beach and had all these ideas. I came home and wrote nonstop for hours.”

  “When can I read it?” I ask, sinking into the sofa and opening the bottle of wine that I now see is the Prisoner. I guess I’m getting my celebration tonight after all.

  “Soon—I’m not that far in. But this is different from the others I’ve abandoned. This manuscript feels special. I think this will be it. A worthy follow-up. Finally!” He leans in. “I think this one will shock everyone, coming from me. A little more controversial than my last.”

  “Your agent must be happy.”

  “I haven’t mentioned it yet—don’t want the pressure to finish any faster than I want to.”

  “I get it,” I say, although I don’t. I wish he would put himself under a deadline, but he won’t. If his agent knew, he’d push him. And it’s not about the money—sales from his debut, which hit the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for twenty-two weeks, are still solid all these years later. It’s about the fact that I want him to be that Ethan. The one who wrote like it was his job, not like it was a hobby. That Ethan was driven, determined. And after his huge success right out of the gates, I thought he would be motivated to do it all over again. But he said he was worried about a sophomore slump. That he couldn’t supersede his success, let alone match it. He got into his own head. He became depressed.

  But tonight he seems to have bounced back from my tardiness and moved on to his day. So I’ll take this Ethan and hope he sticks around. Because he’s exactly the Ethan I need right now—focused on himself and not me.
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  “I’ll be right back,” Ethan says. “Going to grab a bottle of water. Want one?”

  “Sure.” I take a long drink of my wine and curl my feet underneath me. I’m happy for the few moments of silence. The lights are dim in the room, so the front is illuminated by a lamppost. I stare out, a few cars passing by on Montana, the street that runs in front of our house. I take a deep breath and start to sink deeper into the sofa when I see a woman on the other side of the road.

  It’s Stephanie.

  I set my wine down and slowly walk to the window. Not entirely trusting myself, I peer out at the woman. Long dark hair. Medium height, medium build. Wearing something entirely different than she had been at court. But still, it looks a lot like her. And she’s staring this way. I pull the window open and call out to her, “Stephanie!”

  A car pulls up, and the woman gets inside. I watch as it pulls away, not sure whether it was her.

  “Who were you calling to?” Ethan asks, handing me a bottle of water.

  “Stephanie,” I say, embarrassed. I feel my cheeks flush. Am I losing my mind?

  “Who?”

  “The sister of Jeremiah’s wife.”

  Ethan blinks several times. “And she’s at our home why?”

  “I don’t know. But I think she followed me. If it was even her.”

  He grabs my hand gently and squeezes it. “So was it her or wasn’t it?” he asks, not unkindly. I can see the concern in his eyes. He’s always been protective—wanting me to call him on my way home from work, needing me to lock the doors whenever I’m home alone, insisting I sleep with a Maglite by my bed in case someone were to break in.

  “I don’t know. But I feel like it was.” I glance toward the window again.

  “Then we should call the police.” Ethan lets go of my hand and walks toward the coffee table where his cell phone is resting.

  I half laugh. “And tell them what? A woman matching the description of the sister of a murder victim my client was accused of killing was standing on a public sidewalk on the other side of the street from my house? For all I know, she lives in Santa Monica.”

  “Well, I don’t like knowing sisters of murder victims who were married to your clients are showing up anywhere near where we live. It reminds me of Franklin.”

  “He never came to our house.”

  “He showed up at your office. That’s not much better,” Ethan says.

  “I know, but it was that one time. The restraining order scared him off after that. I think I’m probably just being paranoid. Let’s have our wine and relax.”

  Ethan looks at me hard.

  “What?” I ask, but I already know. The pendulum has swung again.

  He shakes his head. “You’re finally home, and now disgruntled people are showing up at our house? How am I supposed to believe you have any control over how much your job affects us? And it was not only that one time. Need I remind you of how long this has been going on, since your first case? How your client’s wife wrote you letters for months about how her boys were destroyed by the guilty verdict? And then after he was killed in prison, more letters . . .”

  I rub my temples, not wanting to think of that case. Of those letters. “They eventually stopped.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, am I irritating you?”

  “Ethan,” I start, taking him in. The dark circles under his eyes. His rumpled hair. “I was young—like you said, it was my first case when I was new to the firm . . .” But I can still hear the guilty verdict being announced and recall the defeated look in Ed’s eyes as he’d stared at me. The way the prosecutor had smirked in my direction. Then the subsequent life-in-prison sentence. I had been sure we’d prevail. But that was the thing—you could never predict what was in the jurors’ hearts. To which side they would tumble.

  “Please.” Ethan rolls his eyes, reminding me of an annoyed teenager. My focus on my career has always been a point of contention.

  I walk over and thread my arm through his. “I hear you, and I’m sorry my job has had such an impact. I’m also sorry I didn’t take Franklin’s stalking more seriously. That I let my work get in the way of our lives. I think I’m exhausted and imagining things. It wasn’t her.”

  “I’m sorry too—I shouldn’t have brought up that case. I know how hard it was on you.”

  “It’s all right. You were upset.”

  He puts his arms around me, and I lean into him, inhaling his scent.

  “You’re sure you didn’t see her outside? That I shouldn’t call the police?”

  I’m not sure at all. But I tell my last lie of the day (I swear!) and say that I am.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TUESDAY

  CAPTURED

  I don’t know how long I’ve been watching the spider on the wall. It crawls, then stops, then inches up a little more, then freezes. This is the spider’s entire existence: searching for a way out of this concrete cell, just like me. Only this eight-legged creature actually has a chance. He can crawl through a crevice. He can spin his sticky web high enough to find the best escape route, while my only way out is to use my mind.

  Q left 319 minutes ago with no promise of return. He let me eat my bread and take two gulps of water from a bottle he held to my lips, then announced that he had things to do. What? I wondered. Pick up his dry cleaning? Go to the gym? Call his mom?

  He still hasn’t taken off his ski mask. And best I can tell from the condition of his hands—smooth, no bulging veins, no age spots—he could be anywhere between twenty and thirty-five years old. His nails are clean and manicured. To me this means he’s not someone who works with his hands. He cares about his appearance. It’s not much. But at this point, my small observations are all I have to go on.

  When I met Ethan, the first thing he said to me was that he felt like I was sizing him up. That my eyes seemed to pierce right through his chest, and he’d felt it physically somehow and had to take an extra breath. He’d said it exactly like that too—that was the author in him, always brushing words onto a beautiful canvas. At the time it struck me as interesting and different, and I was in desperate need of both in my life.

  We’d been set up on a blind date by someone I worked with. We’d agreed to meet at a Starbucks in Venice Beach, both of us admitting later that a coffee was all either of us had in us, our dating lives both riddled with one disaster after the next. We were both weary.

  “I am sizing you up,” I answered, studying his intense brown eyes, his sandy-blond hair, suddenly feeling self-conscious in my jeans and plain white tank top. I glanced at my toes—I should have gotten a pedicure.

  “And?” He cocked his head and adjusted his glasses, which I loved immediately—not hipster but not boring. Something perfectly in between.

  “You eat healthy and take care of yourself, but exercise is not your friend.”

  He started to say something, and I kept going. “I don’t mean it like you’re out of shape. I mean I’m not going to find you on Muscle Beach anytime soon—and that’s a good thing.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “You’re smart with money—in fact, maybe a bit frugal. Maybe your friends make fun of how cheap you are?”

  “Wow—harsh.” He grinned. “But true—how did you know?”

  “The frayed laces on your shoes—the faded jeans that you didn’t buy that way.”

  “Patrick could have told you all this.” He paused, referencing the man who had set us up. “But he didn’t, did he?”

  “Nope.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “You’re good. Real good.”

  “I have to be—it’s my job.”

  “To size up blind dates?”

  I let out a short laugh. “No, to make quick but accurate assessments of others. By the end of this date, I’ll be able to tell you a lot more.”

  “So we’re staying? Going to order coffee and everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you can tell me my drink, I’ll buy you dinner.”

&nbs
p; “What if I don’t want to have dinner with you?” I retorted, feeling a rush of blood to my face. Because I’d already decided I very much wanted to have dinner with him.

  “I already know you do,” he said, now seemingly reading me. “You’re blushing.”

  “I’m hot . . .” I fanned my face and looked away.

  “Uh-huh.” He gave me that look he still gives me, the one that both pisses me off and makes me happy, depending on the scenario.

  “Your order is a tall Blonde with raw sugar,” I said, wanting to turn the focus back on him.

  “Oh, come on. I’m not that frugal!” he quipped, but a microexpression passed across his face. He was probably that frugal.

  I went on, feeling bolder. “In fact, my suggestion we meet at Starbucks probably made you roll your eyes. You strike me as more of a local coffee shop kind of guy. Or maybe a diner? But not an ironic one. A real one. Where you’re sitting at the breakfast bar sandwiched between two eighty-five-year-old men enjoying your four-ninety-nine special with bottomless coffee as you write.” My prerequisite Facebook stalking had informed me he was a writer. Freelance mostly, as he worked on his novel.

  “Guilty as charged.” He smiled. “And that is my drink, but no sugar. Trying to stay healthy, as you mentioned earlier.”

  “Aha!” I held up my finger.

  “And that’s why they pay you the big bucks.” He walked toward the counter to order our drinks.

  Is Ethan looking for me now? I have no idea how long I’ve been gone, but I know it’s long enough that Ethan should be worried. I know if he didn’t come home, I’d be out of my mind with concern. Calling everyone we know, police stations, hospitals. In my line of work, I deal with terrible things happening to people every day. I would automatically assume the worst. It’s what I do. But Ethan? Would he immediately do those things or assume I hit some bad traffic on the way home? My phone died? I’ve done it to him before—told him my battery died so I could steal a couple of hours with Sam in a hotel room. Or texted that I was crashing at Carrie’s after too much wine. I’ve lied one time too many, and now could be my penance for those indiscretions. Or what if Q took my phone and texted him something that made him think all is okay? A shiver runs through my body. What if he has no idea I’m in danger? The thought shakes me hard.