Not long after she released all three books, people started reading them. And liking them. And reviewing them. Some people were nasty, of course, the internet being the internet. But only one of the one-star reviews managed to really stick in her craw. It was from Bored Reader, and the headline read, Hopefully this writer can be good at other things because it’s not writing stuff. The review’s grammatically incorrect headline was just the tip of the iceberg. The review itself didn’t have any specifics about the book. Just a string of book review clichés that could have easily been cut and pasted from another romance novel’s sales page.
But it didn’t seem to matter what any of the negative reviews said—the damn things kept selling, and the checks kept coming.
And while Rachel was right, Zoey hadn’t exactly gone around crowing about it, she hadn’t kept any of it a secret from her boyfriend, either. But now that she thought about it, his insulting words that night at dinner—if a last-minute trip to the food court at the Woodland Hills Mall because “I could fucking rape some chicken tenders right now, babe” could be considered dinner—were the most he’d ever uttered about her literary accomplishments.
As she sinks into the sofa, she’s remembering the stunned expression on Jerald’s face when he saw the wounded look on hers. The speed with which his expression turned to a smirk, and then a dismissive snarl. Her next words had come tumbling out so fast, she still can’t remember all of them. But they weren’t furious. Not yet. They were specific.
It was a speech she’d rehearsed ever since Rachel had suggested she might be hiding her light under a bushel to avoid causing a fire in her relationship. She explained to Jerald the time it had taken, the effort she’d put in, the rejection letters she’d received over the years and how much they’d hurt. And the whole time, Jerald’s snarl just got more severe, as if she had no right to be boring him with any of these details and oh my God why was she still talking?
And, of course, she knew it wasn’t about the books. Their relationship was a hot mess, had been for months now, and now that fact was bubbling to the surface like magma, ready to melt everything in its path. In the beginning, he’d said all the things he thought he needed to say to land the deal; then, as soon as they decided to go exclusive, he merged with her sofa. It’s where he spent most of his time whenever he came over, and the steady stream of criticism he gave her seemed designed to derail any decision she might make that would require him to get up off it.
Maybe they could have recovered, sought higher ground. But what Jerald said next was even worse than his opening line. “That’s fine and all, babe, but I honestly don’t think you’d need the books if you felt better about your body.”
She spoke her words as she thought them. For her, that was rare. “Did you just say I only wrote my novels because I’m fat?”
“I didn’t say you were fat. You said you were fat. I said you don’t feel good about your body, and when you don’t feel good about your body you have to do all these other things to feel better about yourself. Just be you, is what I’m saying.”
“I am being me. The books are me. All my life I’ve wanted to be a writer.”
“Yeah, well all my life I’ve wanted to date a supermodel but . . .” He realized his mistake too late and went quiet and still, as if she might not have realized it was a mistake.
“But you’re just dating me? Who’s fat, but not fat, apparently. I just feel bad about my body. I’m sorry. What are we even talking about right now?”
“Stop yelling.”
She’d barely raised her voice, but the next thing she heard herself say was, “I’m sorry, Jerald, but I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“I just . . . wish it was something else, OK? I just wish you’d found something else to do other than those books. They’re weird and they’re hard to explain to people and I mean, I know you’re not crazy about working at Dr. Keables’s office, but you’re good at other things, Zoey. You are. You can be good at other things.”
Of course, she recognized the phrasing, but it was his tone that gave him away. He sounded like he was continuing a conversation they’d been having for months instead of just a few tense, awful minutes. And that was it—he had been having the conversation for months, just not with her. He’d been having it with himself, and along the way it had taken the form of a one-star review.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, “that was you.”
“What?”
“Bored Reader. You’re Bored Reader!”
Anyone who’d never used the moniker Bored Reader on the internet before would have reared back in shock or simply shaken his head in confusion. Instead, Jerald went really still and tried not to chew his lower lip.
“‘Hopefully this writer can be good at other things because it’s not writing stuff’ . . . That was you. You wrote that review.”
Jerald’s sneer had been replaced by a deer-in-the-headlights-of-an-eighteen-wheeler look. This should have satisfied her on some level, but it didn’t. Instead, her stomach felt like it was coated in ice. Her face, on the other hand, felt like it was made of melting wax that was about to smack to the table in front of her, exposing the visage of a rageful she-demon.
“You son of a bitch!”
Her voice went off like a gunshot in the sparsely crowded food court, and she saw the reactions to it as if through fogged glass. A few tables away, a mother let out a small offended yelp and tapped the table in front of the child sitting across from her, as if to remind Zoey there were young, impressionable minds present. A man in a baseball cap and a dark waffle-print coat who’d been walking slowly past their table slowed his steps even further and turned. Clearly he thought a fight was about to break out and didn’t want to miss the fireworks. The dude was right, whoever he was.
Her volume rocked Jerald back in his chair, and he ended up with palms flat on the table on either side of his food tray, as if he was afraid the sheer force of her anger would send his chair flying out from under him. Then, just like that, he was gone.
And, scene, as Rachel likes to say.
Only it wasn’t the whole scene.
The whole scene included those moments she’d sat alone afterward, enduring the stares of other food court visitors, as the adrenaline rush of anger gave way to the crippling, bone-deep ache of regret, knowing she’d have to get an Uber home because he’d probably left her there. She hadn’t just said too much, gone too far. She’d lost something—the delusion that inside she was all sunshine and roses while her girlfriends were the tough, hard-edged bitches. She’d lost a certain sense of superiority to any woman who’d ever had to resort to raising her voice to be heard, to be seen.
And now, alone on her sofa, awaiting the return of her no-longer-quite-so-smelly cat, she wonders if there’s ever going to be a time in her life when she doesn’t feel like a negative emotion is an indulgence she can’t afford, a passport to places inside herself she’d rather not visit.
In the meantime, where the hell is Boris?
When it comes to her cat’s movements, Zoey has an internal clock, complete with little alarms that go off when the cat does something off schedule. Even amid her painful reliving of her breakup, one of those bells is ringing now. He should have come out by now. She gets to her feet, counts off her steps down the hallway, an old trick she’d learned to center herself. It almost works. Every third step or so she’s back in that food court, suffering through the gallery of Jerald’s dismissive facial expressions.
Cold air hits her when she reaches her second bedroom, the one with the elliptical machine she never uses and the work space she managed to assemble by clearing a space out of all the old boxes full of paperbacks she keeps telling herself she’ll donate someday but can’t bring herself to part with. The little sliding door to the tiny patio where Boris’s litter box has been sitting for two days is still open, but there’s no sign of the cat anywhere near it. And only now does it occur to her that leaving the sliding door open l
ike this isn’t exactly safe. The patio’s got a high stone wall around it, over six feet high, but still, it’s not too high for a determined burglar to scale. The last two nights she was home before dark, but tonight’s impromptu trip to the food court kept her out late for the first time since Boris’s cheesy feast, and she hadn’t pulled the patio door shut for fear Boris would need to use the bathroom while she was gone. Funny how one visceral fear—the fear of cat doo-doo in your bedroom—can override another, the fear of a robber sneaking into your house.
She’s about to laugh at this thought when suddenly her forehead is singing with pain. Somehow she tripped so badly she managed to cross the entire room in no time at all. It feels like the floor itself rose up under her feet and threw her. Her first thought is earthquake. They’ve had a bunch in Oklahoma over the last several years. Or maybe she just tripped on one of the boxes. She’s still trying to tell up from down, realizing she’s actually fallen to her knees against the wall, when a viselike grip around the back of her neck draws her backward and slams her head into the wall again. Every muscle in her body reacts to this terrible awareness that the forces suddenly controlling her limbs are not the miniature chaos of a freak accident. They’re organized, human.
The pain throbbing in her skull sweeps down her spine, almost strong enough to mask the more focused sensation of a pinprick in the side of her neck. Then she feels a kind of timelessness that reminds her of waking up from surgery.
She’s lying flat now, and there’s a weight in the back of her throat.
She’s blinking against the force of a bright light. For a second, she assumes it’s the overhead fixture in her guest bedroom, but it’s too bright. If it’s not the guest bedroom ceiling, where is it? Someplace with a very hard floor, because whatever surface is under her back is not the soft carpeting of her guest bedroom. And that means the weight on her jaw isn’t the result of books spilled from boxes knocked over by her fall.
Not a fall, a rational voice reminds her, a throw. You were thrown.
Falls don’t pull you back and slam you against the wall a second time. Falls don’t make a pinprick in the side of your neck.
Something is on my face, she thinks with a dullness that suggests the pinprick she felt earlier released some sort of drug into her system, a drug that’s slowly wearing off. Something is on my face and it feels wrong. Then she tries to swallow and feels something lodged against the back of her throat. At first she thinks its phlegm, but the way it only slightly bucks at the force of her swallow sends fear jolting through her. The thing in her throat isn’t natural. It isn’t flesh. It didn’t come from her. And it’s very hard.
It was put there.
When a man leans forward into the light’s blinding glare, she recognizes him instantly. He’s the guy in the waffle-print coat and baseball cap who stopped to stare at her right as she exploded at her boyfriend in the middle of the food court, and he’s caressing her face. He’s got light stubble and eyes like knife slashes on either side of his big, broken-looking nose. At first, she thinks he’s whispering something to her, then she thinks he’s trying to soothe her, then she realizes that he’s shushing her with a gentle, sustained hissing sound.
“Easy,” the man says quietly. “Easy, Zoey Long. Your silence is your strength. Forget everyone who’s ever told you otherwise.”
II
9
Waxahachie, Texas
The first time she used the catheter felt like an unacceptable surrender; the second, the hazard of doing business with serial killers. She’s never had a nervous bladder, so unless her system’s been aggravated by whatever Mattingly drugged her with back in Richardson, both events suggest she’s been in this cellar almost a full day.
Charlotte’s still astonished she managed to sleep, but after he left and the blinding lamp shut off, plunging her into darkness, it seemed less like a choice and more like she’d been gassed. Maybe it really was the latter, but she doubts it. She’d feel groggier and out of sorts, not just thirsty and hungry.
The darkness is impenetrable. Whatever structure is sitting above the storm cellar is windowless, or the storm doors she heard open earlier are sealed down to the last centimeter. Not even a thread of light has appeared during the hours she’s been down here, not a single sound from the outside world has reached her ears.
Over the course of two operations, she’s never been confined for this long. She’s been tied up, held down, treated like a piece of meat, drugged. But she’s never been left in total darkness for what feels like hours on end. Throughout, she’s kept her mind occupied by trying to puzzle out what this phase of the process means when it comes to Mattingly’s modus operandi.
So far, she’s been able to stave off panic by reminding herself she’s not truly alone. Aboveground and close by, Luke is sitting in his armored Cadillac, awaiting a signal from Kansas Command. Much farther away but in a similar predicament to hers, Cole and his team are also underground, waiting for Mattingly to do something other than store her like cargo. Hell, for all she knows, Cole might have some technology that can brighten the images coming from her TruGlass.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s not alone.
She’s not her mother. Not yet.
Based on how far away the storm doors sounded when Mattingly opened them earlier, Charlotte figures the cell must be about ten or twelve feet deep. It also sounded like he climbed a ladder on his way out. If the cellar’s as deep as she thinks it is, she can’t imagine him carrying her down that ladder all by himself. Maybe he’s got an accomplice here, but nothing about Mattingly’s speech suggested as much. He seemed possessive of her and inordinately proud of the face mask and gag he’s placed her in. More importantly, mentioning accomplices, if there were any, would have been a great way to frighten her into silence, and her silence seems especially important to him for reasons ranging from the practical to the pathological.
These questions, however difficult they are to answer in this moment, keep imaginings of her mother’s final hours in the Bannings’ root cellar from doing anything more than knocking at the door to her mind.
The wood beneath her starts to shake, a steady quiver. Some sort of machine or engine has shuddered to life close by.
A vague pulse of light divides the blackness overhead, providing answers to one of the questions that’s circled in her head for hours. Yes, they are in fact a set of double storm doors, and no, they’re not perfectly sealed. The illumination isn’t daylight. It’s red. It has to be coming from the taillights of a vehicle—probably the truck he bought that started all of this. The fact that no pulse of daylight preceded its approach suggests the structure above has no windows at all. Or it’s night again.
The double doors make the same sound they made earlier when Mattingly left her. In the vague illumination given off by the taillights of the truck parked overhead, Charlotte can see her surroundings for the first time. A narrow concrete-walled storm cellar, accessible by a ladder attached to one wall, a ladder Cyrus Mattingly is descending in a different outfit from the one he wore to her abduction. He smells conventional and clean, like Old Spice mixed with Irish Spring, and somehow this sickens her worse than her confines. There’s something on the wall closest to her feet. At first she thinks it’s another ladder, but before she can be sure Mattingly is standing over her, blocking her view.
He places one palm against her exposed cheek, then her forehead. Again, she notes the absence of any sort of perverted desire in his touch. He seems like he’s just checking her temperature.
When he sees her eyes are open, he unfolds the bunched-up edge of the fabric hood covering her skull, turning the extra fabric into a blindfold. Then she hears him mounting the ladder again.
A low, droning whine echoes up the concrete walls, a sharper, more high-pitched sound than the idling truck’s engine. She’s rising slowly into the air. That’s what she glimpsed on the wall a moment before, a track for some sort of automated platform underneath her.
There has to be another track on the wall behind her head given how smoothly and evenly she’s traveling toward the open storm doors above.
Blinded, rising toward diesel fumes, she has the sudden, overwhelming fear that he’s going to back the truck over her once she’s level with the garage floor. It’s irrational, but so is everything else about this situation and this place and this horrible man. But still, it makes no sense that he’d go to all this trouble to take delight in crushing her with giant tires. She’s cargo, not roadkill. Maybe in his twisted mind she’s a wretched mix of both, but still, if he does try crushing her and he starts with her legs, she’d trigger for sure and be able to tear the tire off the damn truck. But if he starts with her head . . .
The cloth blindfold isn’t blackout material, so she can tell her surroundings are changing. She can see the truck’s taillights as she rises past them. Then she’s pulled sideways suddenly. The platform lifted her until she was level with the truck’s open cargo door. She hears a screech just underneath her, then a vaguely familiar rumble: wheels meeting a metal floor. The wheels confirm her initial suspicion: this is a gurney he’s tied her to, but the mattress pad has been removed, turning its hard surface into a subtle form of torture. He’s pushing her toward the truck now. Someone else, someone without her strange history, might be assaulted in this moment by upsetting memories of hospital visits with dying relatives. But the last time Charlotte was tied to a gurney by a psychopath, the psychopath ended up with multiple broken bones; the guy’s on death row now, clinging to sanity as he babbles incoherently to a host of prison psychiatrists about the “angel of darkness” who redeemed his soul.
Organ harvesting, she thinks. Is that what this shit’s about?
She doubts it. Cyrus Mattingly’s strange rituals—from his masks and gags to his startlingly petty method for selecting his victims—don’t suggest something so clinical and cold.
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 9
