Dominique blinked at him. What had happened to the wry, sarcastic Gary she knew? This slow-talking version fascinated and repulsed her at the same time. Gary was never self-pitying. He mocked himself with the same relentless spirit he used against everyone else. He didn’t wallow.
“Come on now, Gary. Think.”
“You’re not listening to me. It’s Trin,” Gary insisted.
“That’s your delusional side at work again.”
“You’re not paranoid if someone really is out to get you. You can laugh all you want, babe.”
“I’m not laughing.” She held up her chained hands. “Anything funny about this to you?”
“No, of course not.” He paused. “Dominique, I’m sorry about this. I dragged you out to the country and into this mess. I’m sorry about a lot of things.”
“Let’s worry about how we’re going to get out of here. You can apologize to me later.”
“Babe, I don’t know how much later there’s going to be. Listen to me, will you? Just for once, believe me. There’s exactly one thing I know for sure.”
“Which is?”
“Trin wants me dead,” Gary said. “And she’ll do anything to get her way.”
Chapter 5
Two hours and forty-seven minutes after the van had left the house in the Hudson Valley, it skidded to a halt and the engine went dead. It was almost six o’clock Friday evening. Dominique knew they’d spent most of the time on highways, but the past hour had seen them traveling along a series of roads with potholes like moon craters, before they hit pavement-free dirt paths. It had been a rough ride in the back of the van.
The driver’s door opened and closed. “They’re coming,” Dominique said. “What do you want to do?”
“Not a damn thing,” Gary warned her. “They’ve got guns. They’re going to do whatever Trin paid them to do. Which means they’ll hurt me but they’ll probably leave you alone.”
They waited for the door of the van to swing open, but it didn’t. Five minutes crawled by, then ten. The only noise was the low growl of a plane overhead.
“You hear that?” Dominique asked.
“The plane?”
“A single-engine Cessna coming in for a landing.”
Gary frowned. “When did you become an expert on aircraft?”
“My brother’s a pilot. Don’t you remember?”
“Sure, but Desmond flies choppers. That’s not the same thing.”
“He’s trained to fly other planes. He used to co-own a Cessna with some other pilots. A couple of times, he flew to New York to visit me. He’s taken me up with him.” The memory almost made her smile. Desmond had a saying about flying, and she wracked her brain for it. It was something about running with the stars, only that wasn’t it. Running with the stars sounded like a bad reality show about jogging in Los Angeles. Desmond’s words were more like poetry.
“I don’t remember any of that.” Gary’s voice was sour.
“He had to sell his share when he got divorced. It was before I met you,” Dominique explained. “The point is, a small plane like that, flying so low, means there’s some kind of airport or landing strip near here.”
“You have no idea where we are! We could be anywhere!”
“We’re less than a three-hour drive from your house,” Dominique pointed out. “We’ve stopped somewhere near a runway. That’s something to go on.”
“That’s not going to help us.” Gary looked down, shaking his head. “Look, this isn’t a movie, babe. You need to just go along with what these people want. They’re not going to do anything to you. I’m the one they want.”
Before Dominique could answer, there was the sound of a lock turning, and the door opened. Frigid air rushed into the van.
“We’re here,” said the Viking. He must have taken off his balaclava for the drive, Dominique reasoned, but it was back on his head now.
He stepped back and swung the beam of a flashlight around. Dominique saw trees all around them. They were in a clearing and the ground was muddy. The sun had already kissed the sky goodnight, but the stars were hidden behind a thick blanket of gray clouds. If it rained, the dirt roads out might well be impassable, she knew. Then she noticed the house.
When Dominique was a little girl, she’d nursed an obsession with haunted houses. She couldn’t tell Nana the real reason—she thought they might help her talk to ghosts, and she had to hide that along with her curiosity about Ouija boards and other occult objects—so she pretended that she thought they were romantic. The more ruined they were, the more she loved them. The house in front of her could have been plucked out of her dreams. It looked as if it had been dipped in acid that was eating away at its façade. Most of the paint had been picked clean off, leaving the structure a weathered gray that was slightly lighter than the slate of its Mansard roof. There was a big verandah at the front, marked with a row of lean, elegant columns. The first-floor windows were boarded up. The place was so dilapidated it looked as if it were swaying slightly to one side. Or maybe it was bowing with a shaky grace, praying that someone would lift it from its torpor before it was too late.
“Please tell me this is a joke,” Dominique said.
He leaned in slightly. “What?”
“That house will blow down with the first gust of wind. It looks like it’s been standing since Noah’s Flood.”
He turned his head and shrugged then stepped into the van. “You first,” he said to Gary.
“Leave Dominique alone,” Gary snapped. “You can do what you want with me, but leave her out of it.”
Dominique knew Gary was trying to do the right thing, but his words had the hollowness of secondhand speech
