“It’s not up. We can still keep trying.”
“He’s already destroyed it. He’s in control now. All I can do is kill you and collect my money.”
Emily considered telling him. She knew where the evidence was. She knew it had not been destroyed. She knew what the box looked like, and approximately what it contained. But she knew that the idea of trading the evidence for her life was an illusion. If she told this man, he would kill her. And then he would kill Sam Bowen to get the box. She had to get that idea out of her mind. There was no giving in, no surrender.
There was nothing left to do but try to fight him. She would try to butt her forehead into his face. She would take advantage of his momentary shock and pain and kick him, trying to push him into the grave. Then, whether she succeeded or not, she would run toward the highway. Immediately she noticed that having a plan, no matter how foolish, made her feel stronger.
As she walked, she worked out various details. She would have to make her move a surprise when she was at the grave. When she ran, she would have to sprint as fast as she could for a minute or two with her hands behind her. It would be difficult to keep from falling with her hands cuffed like that. She hoped that walking this way would be enough practice to help her do it. In any case, this was all the preparation she would get. She concentrated on hating him, visualizing her head smashing into his face.
He said, “If you can tell me where the evidence is, then I’ll leave you alive. I’ll get in my car and drive off. It will take you an hour or so to walk to town and wake somebody up or flag down a car on the road. That’s all the time I’ll need. I’ll leave you alone.”
Emily made herself the perfect liar. She had no doubt that he intended to kill her, and that telling him about the box would only get other people killed. “If I had found it, I would have given it to you. I haven’t found it. At this point, I’m wondering if this evidence even exists. Maybe if Phil said he had it, he was bluffing. I don’t know. In a few minutes, it’s not going to matter-at least to me. I’ll be dead, won’t I?”
The man in the mask kept her walking toward the grave, and Emily could make out its exact shape and contours. The hole looked deep and dark. There were two high piles of dirt-one on each of the long sides-but the head and foot were clear. She walked toward what she felt was the head, hoping he would come, too, and he did.
There were three more steps. Two. One. She whirled and used her legs to spring into him to butt his face, but he seemed to have become smoke. He wasn’t there. He was already to the side of where he had been. He tripped her and pushed so she fell full length on her belly beside the grave. In an instant, he was straddling her. She felt the gun muzzle pressed against her cheek.
He said, “That wasn’t a very effective move.”
She was trembling a little, waiting. She wondered if she would hear the shot.
Then she felt the gun move away from her cheek. He seemed to be putting it out of her reach somewhere. So that was it. He was going to rape her before he killed her. She felt his weight shift downward so his body was above her thighs. She prepared herself for her clothes to come off.
He was fiddling with her handcuffs. There was a click, then another. The handcuffs came away from her wrists.
He said, “I can’t let you walk a road like that with handcuffs on. If the wrong car comes along, you’re liable to end up dead, anyway.”
“You’re letting me go?”
“You don’t have what I want.”
“But the grave. I thought-“
“I need to have a half hour or so before anybody comes after me. It’ll take you that long to dig your way out. Get up.”
Emily stood. He took her hand and lowered her into the grave. She looked up, and it disturbed her to see the sky as a dim rectangle of light with the man in the ski mask framed in it. All he had to do was pull out the gun, shoot her, and push the dirt in on top of her.
He said, “I’m sorry I put you through all that for nothing, especially making you strip that night and everything. I thought you had what I needed.”
She said nothing.
He turned away, and for a moment she heard the sound of him walking through the weeds.
She stepped backward to the wall of dirt at the foot of the grave. She was not a tall woman, and the opening looked far above her head. She waited for the sound of the man’s footsteps to come back, but she didn’t hear any. The earth smelled wet and loamy, even though it hadn’t rained for months. She imagined there were worms and bugs, but the grave felt like a refuge now.
After what seemed like a long time, she heard a car engine, and then the sound of tires on gravel, with the ticking of stones kicked up against the steel undercarriage. Then she heard the deeper sound of the engine accelerating. She couldn’t tell which direction it was going from down here, and she knew she was going to regret not having better hearing. The sound faded.
Emily allowed herself to feel a tentative sense of relief, and then as though she had opened a window in a flood, the joy roared in to engulf her. She took a breath of air and it seemed to keep coming, her lungs filling to strain her rib cage. She let the air out in a long, low “Oooooh-hooo.” But her voice still sounded scared. “I’m alive,” she said aloud. Then she put her head in her hands and allowed herself to cry. After a time, she seemed to run out of tears, and she took off her jacket and dried her tears on her sleeve.
Emily looked around her. She would have to dig her way out with her hands, just as he had said. She tried to jump up and pull some of the dirt down into the hole, but she couldn’t reach high enough. She tried three more times, but with each jump she was farther from succeeding. She tried digging a set of footholds into the earth wall at the end of the grave, like the rungs of a ladder. It took a long time, and it hurt her fingers. She couldn’t seem to make the holes deep enough to hold her weight, and each time she tried to climb, her foothold would break and she would fall back down. Finally she measured a spot on the wall that was as high as she could raise her foot, and concentrated on gouging one big hole in the wall at that spot.
When it was as deep as she could make it, she placed her right foot in it, raised her body up, and placed both her hands at the rim of the grave. She tangled her hands in the thick weeds, pushed off with her foot, and got her chest up to the surface. She used her hands to grasp other clumps of weeds as they came within her reach, dug her toes into the earth, and pulled herself out onto the ground. She lay there for a time, recovering her strength and her wind. Then she lifted her head to look around her slowly and carefully.
She could see the little house where she had spent the day and night handcuffed and in terror. It seemed harmless and empty now. She rose to her knees and took a long and careful look in every direction for some sign that the man had come back. She got to her feet and looked again, and then began to walk toward the distant road.
After a few minutes, Emily heard the sound of car engines in the distance, then saw a row of headlights coming up the dark road. She walked toward it, then began to trot, then broke into a run. As the lights approached, she could see that they were all too close together, too regularly spaced to be normal traffic. They were coming at a very high speed. When the cars reached the entrance to the long gravel road into the farm, they all pulled to the shoulder of the highway. Two men jumped out of the lead car in the glare of the headlights behind them, and she could see their car was a police car. The two men opened a metal gate, running with it to make it swing out of the way. The other cars all moved around the lead car. Four of them kept going, accelerating along the road past the farm, but the others all made the turn onto the gravel road.
Searchlights on the police cars swept across the weedy fields. When they crossed the gravel drive, they illuminated clouds of dust that their tires had kicked up. One of the beams swept across her, stopped, and came back to settle on her. Then the other beams joined it, and made it so bright that she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She just stood still and held her arms over her head.
She heard a man’s voice amplified electronically: “Are you Emily Kramer?”
“Yes,” she shouted, and nodded her head dramatically so they could see it from a distance.
She heard the sounds of running feet now, heavy footsteps and the whipping of weeds against their legs. A closer voice said, “Where is the man who took you?”
“He left. I don’t know how long it’s been. I had to dig myself out of a hole. At least half an hour or forty minutes, maybe an hour.” The lights seemed to dim a bit, so she opened her eyes. There were tall black silhouettes around her. One caught up with the others, and suddenly wrapped its arms around her.
