gear, and water was soaking through his thin jacket to his skin. Drops of rain slid behind the collar of his shirt and traced their way down his back. Holding the flashlight in his right hand, he created handholds with his left wherever he could find them. He crisscrossed the slope, shining his flashlight left and right, not quite sure what he was looking for. He was breathing heavily, a little surprised by how tricky the descent was proving to be. He made himself a promise to cut down on the Scotch and to hit the gym at least three times a week. Well, two anyway.
About fifty yards from the top, a small rock outcropping McCabe was using as a toehold gave way, and before he could stop himself, he slid a good ten feet on his chest through muddy, stony soil. He came to a painful stop against a tree root. His flashlight landed about three feet to his right. It was still on. About ten feet beyond the flashlight, reflected in its flickering beam, two black eyes stared back at him. He lay perfectly still, slowing his breathing, carefully watching whatever it was that was watching him. He could hear the voices of the others shouting from the top. ‘Hey, Mike, are you alright?’ ‘Did you hurt yourself?’
He didn’t shout back for fear of startling the animal or whatever the hell it was. A cat? Maybe a big rat? With his left hand he scooped up a small handful of wet soil and tossed it in the direction of the eyes. Nothing. He gingerly nudged his body a foot or so toward the light. Still nothing. He slid another foot. Then another. He wrapped his hand around the barrel of the light and lifted it up. Still no movement. The shouts from the top grew more insistent. He pointed the light directly at the eyes. They shone back brightly. Now he could see the shape of a face. A white muzzle. A black nose. He crawled toward it. Not wanting to shout, he pulled out his cell and hit Maggie’s number. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
‘I’m okay,’ he told her. ‘I found her dog. It’s dead.’
4
The throbbing beat of a headache provided the accompaniment to Lucinda Cassidy’s slow return to consciousness. She was alive. She was certain of this, but she wasn’t sure where she was or why. She opened one eye. Then the other. She was looking straight up into bright overhead lights that forced her to squint until her pupils adjusted. She was lying flat on a bed with raised sidebars in a small, nearly bare room. Practically everything in it seemed white except for the hospital gown she was wearing. It was the kind that opens at the rear with little blue flowers printed all over it. Hospital bed. Hospital gown. She supposed that’s where she must be. In a hospital. Had there been an accident? She couldn’t remember. The headache didn’t make it easier.
The room didn’t look like any hospital room she’d ever seen before. There was no TV or telephone. No privacy curtain hung from the ceiling. No buttons or buzzers to summon a nurse. Nothing but the bed, a small bedside table, and a single chair that stood against the wall near the door. Lucy tried to lift her hand, wanting to rub away the throbbing pain behind her eyes and in her temples, but her hand wouldn’t move. She pulled harder and realized that what she thought were bandages wrapped around her wrists and ankles were, in fact, restraints tying her to the bed. Both her hands and her feet were secured with canvas straps. No. Not a hospital. A prison. She wasn’t a patient. Someone was holding her prisoner. But who? And why?
Slowly, as grogginess receded, she began to remember. She remembered the fog. She remembered running along the Western Prom, and meeting the man with the hypodermic, the one who called himself Harry Potter. With a kind of despair, she remembered Fritz.
The man must have brought her here. Wherever here was. Okay, that was who. The why, she supposed, must have something to do with sex. It certainly couldn’t be ransom money. Sex slavery? Jesus Christ. That happened to girls from the Ukraine. Not Bates graduates with good jobs in New England ad agencies.
She supposed Harry Potter would rape her. The juxtaposition of the name and the act made it seem ridiculous. To be raped by an adolescent fictional wizard. A British adolescent fictional wizard. ‘Officer, it was ’Arry Potter what done me wrong.’
‘Oh, no, miss, it couldn’t be, he’s such a nice little fellow.’
Ridiculous. Terrifying. She began to laugh. A little hysterically. She was certain he would rape her. When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it. Isn’t that what all the assholes say? Bullshit. She’d fight the sonofabitch every step of the way. Given half a chance, she’d pull a Lorena Bobbit and bite his cock off. The idea of defiance made her feel a little better. Was it possible he’d already raped her while she was conked out? She didn’t think so. Even unconscious, she was sure she’d have some sense of it if that had happened.
If he raped her, what happened afterward? She knew what he looked like. He wouldn’t let her go with a promise not to tell anyone. Maybe he’d keep her for a repeat performance. Or a bunch of repeat performances. Like anything else, though, rape would get old. Then he’d kill her. A knife? A gun? He had a hypodermic. Her mind played with the words ‘lethal injection.’
Never had she imagined life ending this way. She began to cry. Not in great heaving sobs but softly, quietly. This happened to other people. Not to strong, competent people like her. ‘I won’t let it.’ She mouthed the words, a ritual to build conviction. ‘I will not let this happen.’ She didn’t know what she could do — but something. Was this denial? When facing imminent death, isn’t one’s first reaction always denial? What follows in that famous litany? Fear? Anger? Acceptance? She couldn’t remember. Well, if it was fear, she’d just zipped past denial in a hurry. Because now all she felt was deathly afraid.
How long had she been unconscious? Hours? Days? When she didn’t turn up at the office, Charlie Roberts or John Beckman would have called her apartment, called her cell phone. They knew she wasn’t someone who just didn’t show up for work, especially with an important meeting on tap. Would anyone from Beckman and Hawes have called the police? She didn’t know. Maybe she’d already missed dinner with David. She was ravenously hungry. David would have called, wouldn’t he? David would have reported it, wouldn’t he? David was such an asshole, he might have thought she was standing him up and walked out of Tony’s in a huff. Why did she marry him in the first place? Probably for the sex. He was very good at sex. Don’t be stupid. Nobody gets married for sex these days.
Would people, even now, be watching reports of her abduction on television? She imagined pictures of herself flickering on the screen. ‘A Portland woman, Lucinda Cassidy, was reported missing today. Ms. Cassidy was wearing blue jogging shorts and a white sports bra.’ No, they wouldn’t know any of that, would they? She remembered that girl a couple of years ago who vanished from some club. Some creep had shot her. Buried her down in Scarborough. Of course, just last week that high school soccer player, Katie something, disappeared. They hadn’t found her yet, either dead or alive.
Lucy remembered feeling righteous anger sitting safely in front of her TV listening to reports of missing women. She’d never realized how far she was from understanding the awful reality of the thing. How far from understanding the fear that was gnawing at her and wouldn’t let go. Lucy closed her eyes and tried to suppress a rising panic.
‘Control this.’ Almost pleading with herself. ‘Don’t give in to it. The only way out is to stay calm, to think clearly.’ She breathed deeply and slowly just like Rebecca taught her in yoga class. She tried to picture herself in a different place. She concentrated on slowing the beating of her heart. She listened. There was no sound but the distant hum of what might be an air-conditioning system.
She looked around the room again, studying the details. It was a small room, windowless, maybe twelve feet square. The walls and ceiling were white. Both seemed to be covered with some sort of acoustic tile. Lucy supposed, hopefully, that the purpose of the tile was to soundproof the room. That might mean there was someone outside the room who wasn’t supposed to hear what was going on inside. Who wasn’t supposed to hear her if she screamed. There was a door. It looked solid and heavy. Possibly made of steel or some other metal. It had a silvered knob and a button lock. Above the knob was a dead bolt. She supposed it was bolted, but the opening in the door was too narrow to know for sure.
Then she became aware of another sound. Breathing that wasn’t her own. Slow shallow breathing from behind the bed. She held her own breath to listen. Yes, definitely breathing. She was afraid to say anything, afraid to move. In the end she began crying again. ‘Who are you?’ she sobbed. ‘What do you want from me?’
His face, the face from the Prom, came into view. He was holding a hypodermic. He rubbed her arm with an alcohol swab. ‘I’m sorry, Lucinda, but I’m not quite ready for you yet.’
He plunged her back into darkness.
