To Darkness And To Death

Standing in the chill of her cell, she could see how badly she had been fooling herself. Take away her parents’ homes and the great camp and the private schools and trips abroad. She was still rich. She had a home and a car and a thousand objects filling them both: furniture and clothing and camping gear and books and CDs and pots and pans and sharp, long knives that rested in their own square of cherrywood. What she wouldn’t give to have those knives. Now. Now that all her earthly goods had been reduced to the clothes on her back, an iron hinge pin, and three blankets.

And a plastic five-gallon bucket. When whoever imprisoned her here came back, maybe she could spill pee on their shoes.

When whoever imprisoned her here came back. She had been concentrating so hard on what she could do to get away, she had overlooked the fact that she was missing. Not where she should be. People would be looking for her. Wouldn’t they?

She looked at the blankets. At the arrow slits. At the blankets again. She shuffled to the pile. The heaviest one, she thought. She teased it out with one boot-clad foot, balancing carefully to avoid knocking herself over. Once she had a sizable piece separated from the rest of the pile, she hobbled toward the nearest window, dragging the blanket beneath her boot tread. It was as tedious as positioning the bucket had been-step, scrape, step, scrape-although at least now her full bladder wasn’t making it hard to think. Instead, she was charged with the idea that her unknown captors could return at any moment.

The dense wool blanket unfurled from the pile. She scuttled back, positioned herself at the trailing edge, and booted it across the floor. When she had it bunched beneath the arrow slit, she considered a moment, then dropped to her knees on top of it. Shuffling slowly off the fabric, she bent over like a supplicant before an almighty god and worked her head as far under the blanket’s heavy folds as she could. Butted hard against the stone wall, she pressed upward. The blanket rose. She inched it higher and higher, until her kneeling form made an acutely uncomfortable triangle with the curved wall.

This would be the hardest part. Leaning into the stones until she thought the top of her head would split open, she curled her toes underneath her and pushed with all the strength in her thighs. Her legs straightened, her neck trembled, and, greased by the blanket’s smooth surface, her head skidded upward. She was standing. She shuffled close to the wall. The pinned blanket rose until she could feel a change in the angle of the stone beneath her head. The wide embrasure. She pushed, rolling her head up until her face was buried in the scratchy wool. Desperate for extra height, she went on tiptoe. She felt the blanket slide upward, then catch. Pressing her chest against the stone to stop the blanket from backsliding, she risked raising her head.

The blanket was stuck in the middle of the arrow slit. She bent again, rolling her head up against the dangling edge, forcing more material into the opening. It bunched fast. Half of it must be dangling from the outside right now. For a moment, she considered letting it stay like that, but then she realized people might walk by without ever lifting their eyes to see her banner. She pressed her face against the wool and sprang up as best she could, making an awkward en pointe in her boots.

It worked. The blanket slithered through the window and was gone. She heard nothing except a brief crack where it caught and broke a brittle branch. Was it spread out like a picnic cloth on the ground? Draped over a bramble bush? Hanging from a branch? It didn’t matter. It was large, it was white and red and yellow and green, it didn’t belong out there. Anyone who came by would notice it.

She thought of the way it had bunched in the opening, half in and half out. She looked at one of the remaining blankets, a fluffy, fuzzy lavender. She imagined a searcher spotting the wool blanket on the ground, glancing around, seeing another blanket flapping from an arrow slit high above the ground. Imagined friendly feet pounding up the stairs. Imagined someone saying, Hang on, I’ll have you out of here in a moment.

She shuffled over to the blanket pile and began kicking.

10:30 A.M.

Clare was in the middle of listening to Courtney Reid’s litany of complaints when she heard a woman shout from the drive. The search and rescue team had completed their huddle, gone over the topo maps, and accepted assignments in different parts of the wood. The possibility that Millie had simply debunked to her boyfriend’s house had acted as a sort of antienergizer, making it that much more difficult to whip up the necessary enthusiasm for hours of careful searching through cold, bare woods. Even though she was privy to Russ’s doubts about the existence of the alleged boyfriend, Clare’s zeal was starting to flag as well. She kept thinking about the whirlwind of activity that must be going on at St. Alban’s. Next to Christmas and Easter, the bishop’s annual visit was the most important Sunday of the year, at least in terms of polishing silver and waxing wood and laying out the fatted calf. Or the individual puff-pastry quiches, in this case.

“She was supposed to pick up individual pastry shells from the bakery,” Courtney was saying. “Instead, she got phyllo dough. We now have phyllo dough for two hundred and no quiche pastries. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Hang on just a second,” Clare said. “Someone’s hollering out in the drive.” When she had asked Eugene if she could use his phone, he had escorted her to a small den on the opposite side of the foyer from the living room. He had shut the door to give her privacy, but John Huggins, whose ideas of delicacy were somewhat different from van der Hoeven’s, had stuck his head in the door and reminded Clare in no uncertain terms that she’d better not sit yapping on the phone all morning. When he left, the door was still ajar. If she stretched to the length of the cord, she could see out the wide window to the drive. Her view of the porch was restricted; she couldn’t see Eugene, but she could hear him. He must have left the front door open.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

So the young blonde in barn coat and jeans walking toward the porch wasn’t Millie. Clare sighed. It would have been too much to ask, she supposed.

“Reverend Fergusson?” Courtney Reid demanded from the vicinity of Clare’s chest.

Clare brought the phone back to her ear, keeping her eye on the people outside her window. “I’m here.”

“Okay, so my problem is, what am I going to do? Serve baklava? I could send one of the other volunteers to the baker’s for the puff pastries, but I don’t think our budget will stretch that far.”

Eugene had stepped off the porch. The young woman approached him. She said something Clare couldn’t make out, then gestured to the two-no, three men clustered behind her. Like the blonde, they were dressed in sturdy coats and jeans. One of them carried a clipboard. One had a camera looped around his neck. All of them had metal measuring tapes hanging off their belt loops.

“You can use the phyllo dough to make the shells,” she said into the phone. The unheard conversation continued. The woman’s body language said, I’m being polite, but I’m in charge here. Eugene was stiff, as he had been when Clare met him. A shy man shielding himself with an aristocrat’s hauteur. “You’ll have to separate the dough and bake them before you fill them, of course.”

“I thought of that,” Courtney said impatiently. “We don’t have any individual-sized tins to bake them in.”

Clare couldn’t remember why full-sized quiches, sliced up, were unacceptable. She suspected raising the issue would be a lost cause at this point. “There’s a great kitchen supply store in Saratoga. Send someone down to pick up a couple stacks of disposable baking tins.”

“To Saratoga?” Courtney screeched.

The woman handed van der Hoeven several sheets of paper. Clare could spot a letterhead but couldn’t make it out. Eugene bent his head over the documents.

“It’s a forty-five-minute drive,” Clare said, in as reasonable a tone as possible. “Surely you can find someone willing-” Courtney cut her off with a wail of reasons why it would be impossible, impossible, to spare one of the already-too-few volunteers for a daylong trip to Saratoga. Clare let her rattle on. It never ceases to amaze me, how many folks jump straight over ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I can’t,’ Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright drawled.

Eugene turned and disappeared into the house. No farewell, no acknowledgement that the blond woman still stood there. Clare blinked. Not that she was an expert on Eugene van der Hoeven, but that seemed out of character. She heard his footsteps ringing over the floorboards, headed away from her into the living room.

“… and Judy Morrison hasn’t even shown up like she promised…,” Courtney was saying.

The young woman turned to the men gathered behind her and began speaking. She motioned toward the