Harper didn't know how long she stood there, listening for noises, but eventually, she could understand the words.
"…that distillery on Tenth Street. She knows where the booty is."
"…no telling if she knows, but if we keep her quiet long enough, they'll stop talking about filling in the tunnels, and Girardi can send his men to find the hidden treasure himself."
"…think his people are going to let her live?"
"…we were given strict orders… don't want to make a martyr of her…making it hard to find them gold bricks."
Harper gripped the front of her shirt in her hands as if it might help slow her pulse.
She'd been kidnapped all right. But not because of her asking around about the missing girls. She'd been taken for an entirely different reason.
They were going to make her go into the tunnels and find buried treasure.
Knowing how she reacted to tight spaces, Harper could already envision how that would play out.
Someone was going to panic and end up dead. Most likely her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dash's first stop was the last place he saw Harper: Crow Bar.
The place was still closed due to Declan's clean-up after the bar brawl the other night, but Dash needed to retrace Harper's steps from that morning.
Checking around the place for clues or anything left behind turned up nothing.
He let himself out and locked up. Turning and gazing up and down Haven Street, Dash tried to think about where she might go. She'd said she had errands to run. Where would she have gone in the hour between leaving Crow Bar and heading to work? Groceries? Seemed unlikely. Post office? It would not have been open yet before she went to work. She might have stopped off for some food, seeing as she had been too nervous to eat around Dash's mom that morning.
"That's gotta be it," he said aloud, hopping into his car and peeling out, headed to the bodega to talk to Mr. Ruiz.
His favorite sandwich supplier, however, said he had not seen Harper that morning. He hadn't even needed to look at her photo that Dash was ready to show from his phone.
"Of course, I know who you're talking about. Good girl. Comes in all the time. If I hear anything, I'll let you know."
The next stop was Cherry's Diner, and after that, a taco truck he knew that she liked.
Both stops turned up nothing.
Dash could see no other option besides retracing her steps as best he could and visiting her workplace to study it for clues.
The clock was ticking, and he knew his girl was in trouble.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Harper
There was something familiar about the voices behind the door.
Harper pressed her ear harder against the wood, but that only managed to muffle the voices. It sounded to her like two women with high-pitched, loud voices were asking whiny questions, and a third voice, a man's, was growing more and more impatient.
Harper backed away and carefully got down on her knees, peering through the crack between the door and the wood floor. She had to lay flat on her stomach on the stairs, adjusting herself silently, to get a good look from that angle.
Just enough light shone through to reveal the shapes of two women gesticulating and bickering while the man drew a crude map on a sheet of paper.
Harper could not see what the man was drawing, but she saw something that made all her hairs stand on end and chilled her down to the marrow in her bones. As expected, one of the women sounded exactly like Pearl, the one who had tricked her on the beach. The other one spoke in a high-pitched whine that cut through the chatter. "I can't hunt for treasure; I don't got the right shoes!"
That voice. And those shoes were hot pink stilettos.
Harper stepped back from the crack in the door and covered her mouth. Had Opal kidnaped her from advertising? But that made zero sense. Maybe those shoes just resembled Opal's. And her voice sounded precisely like the woman. That was Harper's hope. Squinting, Harper tried to get an idea of her location, but she couldn't identify anything familiar in the people's surroundings on the other side of the door.
Adjusting her body to get a better view of her captors, her foot slipped on the concrete step.
Harper's head hit the door before she could right herself.
The noise she made alerted the people in the next room, whose talking halted abruptly.
Harper scrambled to her feet, steadying herself against the wall, and thought about running back down the stairs and hiding in the darkness. But it was too late for that.
The door flew open.
Opal's unmistakable silhouette stood at the top of the stairs.
"Did our little cub reporter have a nice nap? So soon?"
Harper held on to the wall, trying to control her panicked breath, memorizing everything she could see in the room at the top of the stairs.
"Well, are you going to answer me? I would drug you again, but we need to put you to work, sweetie."
A sudden rush of courage flooded Harper's body. There was no way anybody was going to lock her up again behind that door without a fight. Harper rushed up the stairs, taking Opal by surprise. Opal yelped and cried out for help. Having tackled her to the floor, Harper looked up and realized where she was.
That woman—or these people—had locked her in the basement of the escape room.
A toilet flushed, an unseen door opened, and a stocky, square-jawed man wearing a pinky ring appeared. Although he'd replaced his overpriced suit with denim and a canvas work jacket, Harper recognized him as one of the strange guys that had been hanging around the escape room grand opening while she was interviewing people for her newspaper story.
"Opal, what the fuck? I told you not to open that door!" He had all the same demeanor as every goddamn wise guy in Newcastle that
