drives up from the city for a party and then turns around and goes home,” he said. “Where’s he spending the night?”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I’m just thinking of your reputation.”
“Do you mean to sound like a pompous hypocrite, or was that accidental?”
“I worry about what people might say about you!”
“You’re jealous.”
“I’m not going to get into this right now.”
“Hypocrite.” She knew she sounded childish and spiteful, but she couldn’t stop herself.
“I’m not the one who has to set a good example for my flock. What is it your church teaches? Sex should be reserved for marriage?”
“For a committed, monogamous relationship,” she said snottily. “Since I haven’t dated anyone other than Hugh for the past two years, I think we qualify.”
“A high roller from New York is only interested in one thing, and it’s not the Book of Common Prayer.”
Suddenly she deflated. “I kind of wish that was true,” she said quietly. “But it’s not. He likes me. A lot.”
There was a long pause. When he finally spoke, Russ’s voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry. I have no business sticking my nose into your relationship with him. Forget I said anything.” He paused, then went on with badly faked cheer. “If you two are, you know, moving ahead… that’s great. I mean it.”
“Well, there’s your trouble, as the song says. He’s moving ahead. I’m not.” She stared at the stains on her pants as if the secrets of the universe were written there. “I can’t give him something that already belongs to someone else.” She gave herself a shake. “And you know what? You’re right, this is the wrong time to talk about this. Compared to the Castles and the van der Hoevens, I have no troubles.” She smiled brightly. “Time to go where I can be useful. Don’t worry about trying to catch me later. You’re going to have your hands full.”
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.
She paused. “No, I’ll be at the-”
“We’re going, too. Linda and me.” She could hear his humorless smile. “We’ll see you and Hugh there.”
She was going to die. She realized, now it was too late, that her panic at waking up in the tower room of the old house had been more like playacting than the real thing. She raged and shook and whimpered out of the unknown, the faceless whoevers who had put her there. But she had been on Haudenosaunee land, at home, in a way, and some part of her must have been soothed and strengthened by that realization. She prepared to be the heroine in her own action film, counting on a lucky break like the ones that heroines always catch by the end of the third reel.
Shut in the stifling trunk of a car, she lost any illusions she had left. There was only the darkness, and the noise, and the continuous rolling and thumping and jolting, leaving her bruised and breathless and unable to think. She was in the hands of the man who had killed her brother, and she was so afraid she couldn’t even grieve for him.
The car stopped. She heard the driver’s door open, then one of the back doors. There was a clinking sound and then footsteps going away. After a while, they came back. She braced herself, but once again she heard the clinking in the backseat and then the footsteps disappearing. The next time they returned, though, there was an electronic
She opened her mouth to scream, but he slung her over his shoulder, knocking the wind out of her. He climbed a short set of stairs, teetering under her weight, and she had the stomach-jolting sensation that she was about to fall. The steps were old, massive stone slabs instead of concrete, and there was a cold, fresh wind and the sound of water. That was all she absorbed before he passed into a dim, still place. He swung around, and she glimpsed a whirl of worn wooden floor and two small wooden crates, and then he flexed beneath her, straining, and she heard the squeak of unused wheels on a metal track.
“Nooo!”
The rumble of the door rolling shut cut off her despairing cry.
He didn’t bother to tell her to shut up. That, more than the cavernous, disused space around her, convinced her she was well out of earshot. Whatever happened here, no one would hear.
He humped her across the floor, between tarp-covered lumps and pallets of old-fashioned wooden crates, much larger than the ones he had stepped around at the door. Despite the golden afternoon sun outside, the huge space languished in twilight.
Facedown, she had no idea how high the vast room was, but overhead she thought she heard the sound of wings. The place reeked of machine oil and damp wood and mouse droppings. As her captor crossed the floor, the dust-flecked air grew lighter and the shadows clouding the machinery and the crates grew more defined. She noticed another thing: The sound of water, faint at first, was increasing steadily.
He stopped, leaned forward, unseated her from his shoulder, and thumped her onto a crate like a sack of grain. She tilted her head back. Above her, I-bars and rafters glinted in the pale light streaming from lozenge-shaped windows set high in the wall behind her. She looked at the man who was going to kill her. She had always thought of herself as a fighter, as a leading-the-charge-from-the-deckof-the-
“For chrissakes.” The man wrapped his hand around his upper arm, where she had bitten him. “I told you before, I’m not doing anything to you. You’re going to stay put for tonight. I’ll let you go tomorrow.” He paused. “Or Monday, at the latest.”
“You’re going to let me go.”
“I’m not the bad guy here. Christ! All I wanted to do was talk with your brother about buying some of the Haudenosaunee land. I didn’t know he had his own sister locked up in some kinky game of hide-and-seek.”
“That’s not what was going on!” She was grateful for the tears rising in her eyes. It meant she could still feel grief and outrage. “My brother was protecting me.” At some point between seeing her brother’s face in the tower and facing his murderer here, she had come to accept that Eugene hadn’t discovered she was missing and come creeping in to rescue her. He had put her in the tower, given her a bucket and blankets and food, and if she couldn’t imagine the reason right now, it didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
“Okay, then I’m protecting you, too. In better style, I might add. I’m leaving your gag off, for one.”
He didn’t have any duct tape. Not that she was about to point that out to him.
“There’s a washroom over there.” He pointed toward a dark shaft of a doorway at the far edge of the room. “It’s not in great condition, but it works. And I’ll bring you something to eat and a sleeping bag later. There’s even two cases of your family wine by the door. Be good, and you can have some later on.”
Along with grief and outrage, she could still feel amazement. His tone of voice clearly invited her to admire his generosity. To thank him. He stared at her, expecting some reaction. She didn’t know what to give him. He huffed and turned away. “You’re next to the kill,” he said over his shoulder, and for a moment she had an image of a serial killer’s dumping ground, before common sense reasserted itself. The kill. The river. “You can’t be heard, so don’t bother to wear your voice out yelling.” His figure blurred into the darkness at the other end of the building. “I’ll be back later.” His voice floated through the dusty air.
She expected to see a blaze of light as the wide door-a type of loading dock, she recognized now-slid open. Instead, she heard a muffled
She waited, unmoving. Was it a trick? Did he want to toy with her before doing whatever it was he was going to do with her? Her proximity to the river suggested several unpleasant possibilities. She could hear it more clearly, now she wasn’t focusing all her attention on her captor. Water gurgled and swished directly below the wooden floor, and to her left she heard a steady rumble and hiss, water falling, fast, over an obstacle.
She waited some more. Minutes passed. More wings overhead. Birds. She hoped they were birds. The idea of
