casings or bullets. She imagined the creep who considered this way of hunting
But then her fingers brushed against something else. She grabbed it and then rubbed the dirt off it. She looked at it in the light from the opening up above.
“Oh, no,” she gasped, tears filling her eyes. “Oh, my God, no…”
Moira suddenly realized what kind of game this cold-blooded hunter had caught down here in the past.
In her trembling hand, she held a woman’s tortoiseshell barrette.
“I’ll go pack Moira’s stuff, wait outside for her, and send her away in your car,” Leo said. He glanced over at Jordan’s prisoner stretched across the worktable. Then he locked eyes with his best friend. “I won’t say anything to her, I promise. But I’m not going with her, Jordan.”
They stood in the corner of the cellar’s big room—by an old blue plastic kiddy pool leaning against the wall and covered with dirt and dust. The man was out of earshot.
“You have to go,” Jordan whispered. “You can’t be part of this, Leo. You can’t be involved.”
“It’s too late, I’m already up to my eyeballs in it,” he argued. “Have you even thought this through, Jordan? I mean, the police are going to find his car soon. They’ll be looking for him—”
“They won’t find his car,” Jordan replied, shaking his head.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I sunk it in a swamp about a mile away from here,” Jordan said.
Leo stared at him and felt sick to his stomach. “You—you wouldn’t have done that unless you were planning to kill this guy. You’re going to make him disappear, aren’t you?”
Jordan didn’t answer.
There was a noise outside, gravel crunching under tires. Leo glanced up toward the dirt-streaked basement window, but some bushes outside blocked his view.
“Jesus,” Jordan murmured. He hurried toward his prisoner.
“HELP!” the man screamed. “HELP ME, PLEASE! DOWN HERE!”
Leo heard the car outside grinding to a halt in the driveway.
The man kept crying out for help. Jordan grabbed the handkerchief and wound it into a ball. He tried to stuff it into the man’s mouth, but his prisoner kept turning his head away. “HELP ME! GOD, PLEASE HELP ME!” he yelled.
Leo heard a woman’s muted murmuring as she talked to someone, and then the car door shut. Cell phones didn’t work in these woods, so she wasn’t talking on the phone. There had to be at least two people outside.
Jordan finally grabbed the man by the scalp and slammed his head against the worktable. The man gritted his teeth, but Jordan hit him in the ribs. His prisoner let out a yell, and Jordan forced the gag into his mouth.
Someone knocked on the front door. The sound carried down to the cellar as if it were just outside the room.
Jordan turned to Leo and hissed, “Whoever it is, get rid of them!”
Leo nodded and headed for the stairs. But Jordan rushed toward him and grabbed his arm. “Don’t screw this up for me, Leo,” he whispered. “I can hear you down here, you know. I’m counting on you.”
Jordan’s prisoner tried to cry out past the gag, but it was just muted whimpering.
Leo couldn’t quite look Jordan in the eye. He nodded again. “I’ll get rid of them,” he muttered. Then he hurried up the stairs.
The person outside knocked again—longer and louder this time.
In the kitchen, Leo found a pen in a glass jar on the counter. He didn’t see any paper, so he grabbed a napkin and scribbled on it. The thin paper tore in spots as he wrote:
There was more knocking. Leo knew he was taking way too long to get to the door. Downstairs, Jordan had to suspect something was going on. “Coming!” Leo called, folding up the napkin. “Just a minute!”
He hurried to the front door and opened it.
He recognized the woman from the store yesterday, the pretty brunette. Standing on the front stoop, she wore a dark green windbreaker and jeans. Behind her was an old red Toyota, with the back window rolled down. Leo glimpsed her toddler in the child’s safety seat in back. He had an animal cracker in his hand and was walking it along the edge of the open window.
“Sorry I kept you waiting,” Leo said, a little out of breath. He stood in the doorway.
“Well, I’m sorry to bother you, so I guess we’re even,” the woman said with a timid smile. “My name’s Susan Blanchette. I understand Jordan Prewitt lives here.”
Leo nodded a few more times than necessary. “Yes, but he—um, he’s not in right now.”
“Well, I was hoping he could help me with something. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
One hand still on the doorknob, Leo shook his head and shrugged. “Sorry.”
“I’m staying down the road at Twenty-two Birch Way,” she explained. “My fiance has disappeared. His name is Allen Meeker. He’s a good-looking man in his late thirties—with silver-black hair. He drives a black BMW….”
“Um, I wish I could help you,” Leo said stiffly. Then he held out the folded napkin.
But she didn’t see it. She was glancing just past his shoulder.
Leo swiveled around to see his friend emerging from the kitchen and quickly stashed the napkin in his pocket.
Jordan looked a bit sweaty and frayed, but he put on his friendliest smile as he approached the fiancee of his hostage. Leo stepped aside. Jordan put a hand on his shoulder. “I was in the bathroom.” He turned toward the man’s fiancee. “Hi, again, how are you? Did I hear right? Did you lose somebody?”
She nodded. “Yes, my fiance. I understand you were at Rosie’s place when he was there—almost three hours ago. That’s the last anyone has seen of him. I was hoping you could tell me something—anything. Did he by any chance talk to you?”
Jordan shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t notice much. I wasn’t feeling so well. In fact, I thought I was going to blow chow right there in Rosie’s.” He chuckled. “Huh, guess I had a bad ice cube last night….”
She stared at him and blinked.
“I was hungover is what I’m saying,” Jordan explained. “Hey!” He suddenly grinned and waved at the little boy in the car. “Hey, there, dude! How are you?”
Her son waved back excitedly. “Go Huskies!”
Jordan nodded and gave him a thumbs-up sign.
“You were very nice to us yesterday,” the woman said to him. “Thank you.”
Leo started to step back, thinking he might be able to signal to her somehow.
But then Jordan casually put his arm around him. He gave the man’s fiancee a contrite smile. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful today.”
But she wasn’t giving up. “Rosie said you were in the parking lot when Allen drove away. Did you happen to see in which direction he drove off?”
Jordan thought about it for a moment. “It looked like he was heading toward town—that is, if I remember correctly. Like I said, I was kind of out of it.”
Leo could hear a faint whimpering sound from downstairs. Jordan must have heard it, too, because he stepped outside and started leading Allen Meeker’s fiancee toward her car. Leo trailed after them. He wondered if there was some way he could furtively slip the napkin into her hand.
“Not to alarm you or anything,” Jordan said to her in a hushed voice. “But you don’t suppose he got carjacked, do you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t really know.”
“Has anything like that ever happened to him before?” Jordan asked. “I mean, that looked like a pretty nice car he was driving. BMW’s a classic. No one’s ever tried to carjack him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, maybe he got lost,” Jordan said. “Does he know this area? Has he been to Cullen before?”
