'Argggh.' She was dying. She could feel herself dying, and a moan was the best she could do. It was exactly the way she'd felt in treatment with him, too. She'd never been able to find the right words, the open sesame words, for him to help her get out of the dungeon.
Allegra hadn't had anything to eat in three days, just some water and the coffee. She felt dizzy from the pain in her nose and the drip of blood down her throat. She was dehydrated. Something happened with electrolytes when you didn't drink enough. She'd passed out a few times from hunger when she was dieting, so usually she was pretty careful. She was beginning to hallucinate. She could hear her mother calling for her.
'Dylan, Dylan. Come home.'
She imagined Dr. Atkins calling to her, too. 'Allegra. Shhh. Don't cry. I'll save you.'
Hours passed and her panicked moans got softer.
Forty
Grace Rodriguez came into the office at eight on the button. She was wearing a black suit and was ready for war. She walked into the office that she still shared after all these years with a young associate- this latest one a fat boyish twenty-nine-year-old who was constantly eating on the sly throughout the day whenever he thought she wasn't looking, though how he thought she'd fail to notice when she was only a few feet away in a very small room she couldn't begin to imagine.
This morning Craig Hewlett's space was utterly crumbless, so it was clear he hadn't arrived yet. Grace's heart pounded as she put her purse in the top drawer of her desk and purposefully started the long trek around the building to her boss's office. Even though it was the worst day of Jerry Atkins's life, she was going to have it out with him anyway.
The prosperous accounting firm of Haight-Atkins was contained on one whole floor of a large Third Avenue office building. The walls were a mind-numbing pewter throughout. The floors were covered with industrial-quality ashen carpeting that was shampooed only once a year in the spring. Grace's own space had no amenities, not even a chair for visitors. Jerry's office, where the clients went for their meetings, had to be luxurious, however. His furniture was cherry wood, the chairs and sofas were cushy, the colors turquoise and rose like those used in resorts in the Caribbean. This disparity in their stations, however, did not always rankle Grace.
Usually her self-awareness didn't extend to hurt and bitter, and when she was troubled, she would hide behind cheerful, reassuring smiles like malignant cells sometimes hid in otherwise benign tumors. Her life was carefully structured to shield her from hurt; she thought she was above it, able to roll with whatever punches came her way. But today her daughter was missing.
Historically, Grace was alone with Dylan on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights. And for many years they had been joyful evenings. In recent years, however, her times with Dylan had become ever more painful and difficult. Dylan was twenty years old and still living at home, doing her own thing, coming and going just as she pleased. But she'd become rude and disrespectful, uncommunicative. Grace went over the list of her grievances. In addition, she looked as if she didn't eat anything. She'd promise to come home for dinner, and then didn't come home. When she did come home, she played with her food but didn't swallow very much. Since the summer her bad behaviors had escalated, and last night Dylan hadn't come home at all.
To get to Jerry's office on the outermost tier of the building, Grace had to come out from an inside bank of offices where she worked in a cubicle, then travel all the way around the building on the hallway where privileged partners had offices with big windows and views of the East River and Queens, or the great Manhattan skyline north and south, or Third Avenue looking west. When Grace reached the place where she could see actual natural light shining in from the windows of offices whose doors were open, she felt like a rat coming out of a maze.
She could hardly breathe, her heart pounded with such anger at the mess she and her daughter had become. In the last few months during spring and summer Dylan started acting really weird. Grace had done some soul- searching as she wrestled with herself over what to do about it.
All she'd wanted was a child, a baby girl to love as her mother hadn't loved her. On her walk around the building, she went over her story in her mind. She'd had her baby, and for a long time she'd thought Dylan was enough. When Dylan was a little girl, Grace had enjoyed every minute they were alone. They'd made cookies and played house, done puzzles, learned the ABC's, then math, then social studies, then whatever. She'd thought it was pure joy to have a child. When she was very little, Dylan had spent her days with a nice grandmotherly type who lived in the building. When she was two, Grace took her to all-day school programs. She went to a nearby public school. By middle school Dylan was independent, was coming home on her own, did her homework, and waited patiently for her mom to come home. A good girl.
Grace had always known that Dylan would be her responsibility alone. That had been the deal, and she'd always been perfectly content with it. Their nights together they'd had the independence she thought she valued so highly. She was a mother, protected but free. True, she was not a partner in the firm and had no real job security. Haight had no women partners in the firm. Another excuse of Jerry's for not making
That had been the story she told herself. But now too many things had changed. The little girl was now a big girl, a big problem Grace could no longer ignore, and one she couldn't manage by herself. Grace turned the corner and entered Jerome Atkins's office without knocking. It was early for him to be there, but he hated his wife so much that in a crisis she knew he'd be sitting at his desk staring out the big windows of his corner office, which was high enough to offer a southwest span of magnificent open city views. Pointing in his direction on his desk was the same photo that had been there since the day she met him when she was interviewing for her first full-time job at twenty-two. The photo was of his wife, his son, Maslow, and his daughter, Chloe, who was alive then, but had been dead now for more than twenty years.
'Oh, it's you,' he said, shaking his head when he saw her. 'Terrible thing about Maslow. I'm sick to death about it.'
At the time of Jerome's sixtieth birthday party two years ago, Grace hadn't been invited to the celebration party so the magnitude of the milestone had been lost on her. Now with his eyes sunk deep in purple hollows and his face drained of color, she was shocked to realize that her Jerry, the man she'd loved and trusted for twenty-three years, was an old man.
'Sweetheart, I'm so worried. How are you doing-?' His look stopped her. 'I guess that's a stupid question,' she finished lamely.
'Don't call me sweetheart here,' he said automatically.
'Evelyn isn't in yet,' Grace murmured, crumbling like a cookie as always. Evelyn didn't suspect anything. No one did. He had her tucked away in Long Island City, where no one they knew ever went. He liked her beauty, liked playing house.
'What do you want?' He was wearing a custom suit as black as hers.
'I want to talk to you,' she said softly. 'About Dylan.'
He shook his head. 'I've had dozens of calls. News cameras were at my apartment this morning. I had to go out the service entrance. You wouldn't believe what's going on.'
'I need to talk to you, Jerry.'
'I'm waiting to hear from the police. A ransom call could come in at any time.' He spoke as though to a child.
'We have another serious problem, Jerry,' she said softly.
'Well, I don't have time to hear your complaints. You can tell me tomorrow. If I can make it. With all this I don't know if I can make it tomorrow.' He made a little hand gesture that she was supposed to take as a dismissal. Time for her to trot back into her cage. She was his toy, nothing more.
Instead of leaving, she moved to the door, closed it, returned to a soft turquoise chair, and sat down. 'Jerry, your daughter didn't come home last night.'
'Dylan? Why not?' He looked surprised.
