about the finance charges again.”
Nothing.
The card wouldn’t do the job. She removed her laminated driver’s license from the wallet and tried that. It was thinner than the MasterCard, more flexible, but it had no greater success.
Finally she gave up. The door must be secured either by a dead bolt or by a latch bolt with the diagonal edge facing away from her. Regardless of which was true, loiding the lock was impossible.
She wasn’t surprised, really. The man holding her prisoner was smart-too smart, possibly, to leave the charge cards and license in her wallet if they could be useful in opening the door.
There was a way of defeating a dead bolt, though. She had learned of the technique years ago, while living in a low-rent district near the university, earning her graduate degree. The other unit in her duplex had been broken into, her neighbors’ place cleaned out. She remembered the T.P.D. detective at the scene explaining how the dead bolt on the front door had been released.
Simple enough, he’d said. They just pried the bolt open with an ice pick. Happens all the time.
All she needed was an ice pick. Too bad she didn’t happen to have one available.
Of course, any long, needlelike tool would do. She searched her purse, her suitcase, the box of foodstuffs.
The item nearest to what she needed was the ballpoint pen. But it was too big to fit between the door and the frame.
She unscrewed the pen’s metal casing, thinking that perhaps the ink cartridge inside might work, but although the tube was narrow enough, it was made of cheap, flexible plastic that would afford her no leverage.
One last point of attack presented itself. The hinges. Could she lift the pivot pins out of the barrels and simply detach the door from the wall?
The pins were in tight. Their caps were smooth and featureless, offering no grooves in which to fasten the tip of a screwdriver, even assuming she had one. If she could grip the caps with a pair of pliers, she might be able to tug the pins free. Pliers, however, were another item her abductor had neglected to leave in her possession.
Could she smash the hinges? They were old and rusty, vulnerable to a sharp hammer blow. She searched the room for a blunt instrument, found none. The sillcock would make a powerful weapon, but she saw no way to liberate it from the wall. A loose brick would serve almost equally well; frustratingly, a thorough patting of the walls established that all the bricks were mortared firmly in place.
Hopeless.
The bolt could not be loided or picked. The hinges could not be disassembled or broken. Unless she could flatten herself to the thinness of a pancake and ooze under the door, she was stuck.
It crashed down on her then-the full weight of her captivity. Strength left her. She sank to her knees, planting her hands on the floor to keep from falling prostrate.
Head lowered, eyes squeezed shut, she felt her shoulders shake with soundless sobs.
The patter of dampness on her knuckles was a steady rainfall of tears.
To lose her composure like this was humiliating, entirely unlike her, but she couldn’t help it. Her life, her world, her daily routine, so carefully ordered and meticulously maintained-all of it had exploded like a bomb, and screaming chaos was the aftermath.
What she wouldn’t give right now to be safe at home in her comfortable, familiar apartment, enclosed by walls that were not a prison, locked behind a door to which she held the key.
Her eyes burned. She heard herself sniffling miserably and dragged a hand across her nose.
“Help me,” she whispered to the unhearing room, the empty house, the vast stillness around her. “Help me, somebody. Help me, please.”
11
Harold Gund drove slowly through Tucson’s dark streets, seeking a mailbox.
Best to get Erin’s letter in the mail as soon as possible. Once Annie received it, her fears would be allayed, and any preliminary police investigation into her sister’s disappearance would be terminated.
Still, mail delivery was slow. It might take three days for the letter to reach Annie’s residence. A lot could happen in three days.
Unless he delivered it personally.
There was no particular risk in doing so. Annie would simply assume that Erin herself had delivered the letter in the middle of the night, avoiding the pain of a phone call or a face-to-face encounter, before departing on her mysterious sabbatical. Unusual behavior, but not implausible under the circumstances.
All right, then. Do it.
In less than twenty minutes he reached the Catalina foothills. He guided the van into a townhouse community off Pontatoc Road.
Dangerous to park in the open. He pulled behind an unfinished row of townhouses near the entrance, killed the headlights and engine, and pulled on his gloves before handling the letter again.
On foot he walked along a curving street, illuminated only by low-wattage bulbs above the mailboxes at the head of each driveway.
The development, like most places in the foothills, had no sidewalks. His shoes crackled on scattered dirt at the side of the road.
Annie’s place was just ahead, a single-story home with a red tile roof and desert landscaping, which shared walls with the units on either side. Gund slowed his steps.
Abruptly it occurred to him that if anybody happened to see him here, he could be linked to the letter and thus to Erin’s disappearance.
Then he shook his head. Ridiculous. No one would see him. It was nearly four-thirty in the morning. Everybody in the complex was asleep.
Annie lay on her living room sofa, staring into the dark.
For the past couple of hours she’d snatched brief intervals of slumber, never quite finding the perfect zone of dreamless oblivion that would have lasted until first light. Every random noise woke her-the creak of the house settling, the rustle of mesquite branches outside her windows, the coyotes’ shrill, distant cries.
She wondered what was really keeping her up, what obscure worry nagged her just below the threshold of awareness.
You’re getting to be like Lydia, she chided herself half seriously, remembering her aunt’s nervous disposition, her medicine chest stocked with antacids and headache remedies and sleeping pills. Before you know it, you ‘II be pacing the floor all night long…
Through the living room windows, a sudden orange glow.
The porch light had snapped on.
Annie sat up, blinking.
The light was wired to an electric eye beamed at the driveway. It was a system installed by the townhouse’s previous owners; personally she’d never felt much need for such protection in this part of town.
What would make the light come on now?
An intruder seemed unlikely. In the three years she had lived in this neighborhood, there had never been a break-in.
A coyote was more probable. Or a band of javelinas. The hairy desert peccaries sometimes ventured out of the dry washes in search of food.
She swung off the sofa and pulled aside the curtains, peering out at the driveway and the front walk.
Nothing was there. The light shone on her mailbox and the tangled clump of cholla at its base. The cholla’s needles glowed like moonlit fur.
If there had been an animal, perhaps it had continued down the street. She walked to the door, intending to look, then paused.
