New shame cascaded through me, the knowledge that he’d been watching me at Van’s, had seen Hoffman and me. I tried shaking my head, to tell him that he was wrong, that I hadn’t told anyone anything, that the thing between Hoffman and me was just a stupid kiss, nothing more. His grip was so tight that when I tried the movement, I felt my hair tearing.
“You better not,” he told me. “Nothing about me, about you, about Tommy. They ask whatever they want, you don’t answer. Lie to your heart’s content, they expect that, but you don’t ever mention me. I’ll know.”
The shake hadn’t worked, so I tried a nod, still pushing for a breath. Everything below my ribs felt like it had just stopped working, like it wasn’t even attached any longer.
“I’ll know,” he repeated.
He shoved my face down again, into the floor, letting go of my hair. I saw the edge of a boot, and then my diaphragm unlocked with a spasm, and I gasped in a breath. He made the same noise he had in Mikel’s condo, the one that sounded like he was happy, but he wasn’t moving, and I could feel him looking at me.
“Roll over.”
I couldn’t even manage a plea.
“Roll. Over.”
I closed my eyes and pushed my palms against the carpet, rolling onto my back. I brought my arms around, I suppose it was a strange, instinctive kind of modesty, trying to protect my chest, and I thought he would at least let me keep that, but I felt his gloves on my arms, and he pulled them away.
“Open your eyes,” he told me.
It might have been the hardest thing I’d ever been asked to do, and for what felt like minutes, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I thought about his threat, about screaming, calling for help, but even if I had lungs like Van, no one would come. In my music room, soundproofed and cocooned, I had no way out.
Nothing looked back at me, just the mask inside the hood, dark on darker, empty. I couldn’t even find his eyes, but I could feel the stare creeping down me. Everything Hoffman had said rushed back at me. I’d felt the eyes of tens of thousands watching me live, I’d known millions more had done the same on screens and pages. Pictures taped to walls and downloaded onto desktops, the gaze of men and women, boys and girls, and I’d had to accept it without too much thought, because it was the kind of thing you couldn’t think about for too long, and even now, with the new pictures, they paled next to this.
This was new humiliation, and I wanted to wail. I wanted to beg him to release me, to leave me alone, because I didn’t deserve this.
Some songs end the way they want to end, you can’t do anything about it, and when you fight it, you end with junk. It was his song now, I realized: he’d pick the ending.
The Parka Man put the heel of his boot on the fingers of my left hand, my fretting hand, and let the promise of more weight rest there, pressing just a little. His head hadn’t moved, the dark, vacant holes still watching me. I bit into my tongue, not wanting to give him a sound.
“I’ll know,” he said.
Then he dropped the rest of the weight, and I tasted blood in my mouth as he ground his heel on my fingers. In my knuckles, I felt bone grinding on cartilage. My eyes filled with tears, hot ones, spilling down the sides of my face, dripping into my ears.
It hurt so bad that when he stopped, I didn’t know it.
“I own you,” the Parka Man said, and I heard his boots climbing the stairs. Then only silence.
I rolled onto my side, holding my fingers in my right hand, and I wept.
CHAPTER 29
It took two rapid-fire shots of Jack to make the pain in my hand subside a little, and even then, the sickness in my head remained. I broke ice into a dishtowel, wrapped my fingers with it, praying they weren’t broken. The ache was constant, and felt deep in the bone.
I checked the whole house, trying to make certain he was gone, looking in all the closets, in all the hiding places. It was when I was checking the pantry that I saw how he’d done the alarm, and that was the final straw, maybe.
The control box was high on the wall, above my stock of canned goods, and the door to it was open. I had to take a chair from the kitchen table to get a good look, and when I did I saw that all of the fuses had been pulled, except for the one to the control panel. It could tell me that all portals were secure to the day I died, it would always be lying.
He could come and go as he pleased. He’d done it twice already, maybe more than that. He certainly had been waiting for me in the basement even before I got home.
It was what Van had said, too. He wouldn’t ever stop. Even if he was sincere now in his promise to return Tommy to me in exchange for cash, that would change, that would change as soon as he saw how easily he could control me.
Which is what made me remember the other thing Van had said, about how I was going to end up. But Van was wrong about one thing: I was doubting that the corpse I left behind would be all that nice on the eyes.
He owned me.
He would kill Tommy. Then he would kill me.
The only way I could stop it was if I found him first.
It took me until dawn to find a place to start, and it seemed weak, even by my desperate standards, but I didn’t have anything else. Thinking about everything he’d said, how he’d said it, the one thing I kept coming back to were the words he’d used in Mikel’s condo.
It could mean a lot of things, I told myself. It could mean all kinds of things.
But maybe it means foster care.
There were forty-nine Larkins in the Qwest White Pages, and another twenty-three when I used the iMac in my office to do a Google search. Since I couldn’t remember the first name of either of the parents or most of the kids, I almost panicked. I couldn’t remember the name of any of the four sons.
Of the two daughters, I knew one of them was called Sheila, and I remembered that because I had been so mean to her. Another Google search, this time specifically for Sheila Larkin in Portland, Oregon, kicked back several hits, and by the time I’d sorted all of them it was already past nine, but I’d narrowed it down to three. One of them was thirteen, and had a page devoted to her favorite television shows, movies, and musicians.
She wasn’t a fan.
The second one was just a faculty listing at OHSU, in the Pediatric Care Unit.
The third was attached to a Web site for “Cuddle Group Daycare,” and that was the one I went with, because at the top of the Web page for the site there was a spinning Jesus fish. A phone number and e-mail link were included at the bottom of the page.
I called, and it was answered after four rings. Children were hollering in the background.
“Cuddle Group Daycare.”
“I’m trying to reach Sheila Larkin,” I said. “Is she there?”
“This is she. Who is this, please?”
“My name’s Miriam Bracca. I don’t know if you remember me.”
There was the barest of pauses. “Of course I remember you. What can I do for you, Miss Bracca?”
“It’s actually a little awkward, I was wondering if I could come and talk to you.”
Another pause. I heard a child’s shriek, but I couldn’t tell if it was delight or outrage.
“When?” Sheila Larkin asked.
“Sooner the better, actually.”
“If you don’t mind some dirty diapers, you can come over now.” She gave me an address in the southeast part of town, near Reed College, and I told her I thought it would be about an hour before I got there, and she said
