Run (20 page)

Behind me I hear a radio.

The van stops. It lurches. It slows. I feel the sensation of running over a gravel road. I hear the wheels go over a roadway with loose, jagged stone.

Then it stops.

The door on the driver’s side opens. Shuts. The crunching of gravel.

And although it is dark outside, I see things very clearly when the back door slides open. In the moonlight, a face.

I know that face.

My father.

Next to me is Marie’s wheelchair.

Then his hand reaches for me. It comes for my face like a spear does in some 3D movie. I try to turn away and I scream for him to stop. Then just as blackness comes once more, I hear Marie’s voice. Only this time it isn’t soothing and sweet. It isn’t all kittens and rainbows and water features. There’s a hard edge to it. Also, for the very first time, I hear his voice. For a monster’s voice, it is kind of high pitched.

“I want her and her mother erased,” Marie says. “Your obsession ends now.”

“Or you’ll do what, Marie?” he says, barely challenging her.

“I’ll make you pay.”

“I’ve already paid a lifetime over and over by staying with you.”

“You could have left anytime.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Just get it over with.”

I WAKE UP IN A windowless chamber, the humming sounds of a generator and a string of light bulbs glowing above me.

Someone is stroking my hair, and for a second I wonder if I am in a dream. But then I hear her voice.

“Honey,” says my mother.

I’m cradled in her lap like I used to be when we watched crime TV shows together—a long time ago, when I was small. She continues to stroke my dyed and cut hair.

My first words are not tender or concerned. Ever since I found out the truth, the lies she told me have lined the back of my mind. I can’t just pretend that now that I have found her everything is OK. I’m glad to see her—see her
alive
—more than anything. But I’ll get to that.

“Why did you lie to me?” I ask.

Mom is dirty and her hair is a mess. Her eyes are swimming in tears and she leans close.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But you were too young to understand the truth.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“Now  …  but you were a kid, Rylee. You were my baby. I wanted to protect you.” She closes her eyes for a second, trying to compose herself, then asks, “Where is Hayden?”

I open my mouth to reply, but I don’t know how freely I can speak and I indicate so by darting my eyes around the space we’re in, which I assume to be a mine or a cave. “He’s gone,” she whispers, meaning my rapist father. “He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Hayden’s with Aunt Ginger,” I tell her, still keeping my voice as low as I can. The hum of the generator probably provides some cover for our words, but I don’t trust my mother’s judgement anymore. I love her. I kind of hate her too. I want to ask her a zillion questions but only one seems to matter.

“Is there a way out of here?”

Mom strokes my hair some more. She doesn’t say anything for what seems like a very long time so I already know the answer. She knows that I do.

“There’s only one way out and that’s the way in,” she says.

I shift my weight and stand. I look to the door she’s indicating. It’s a big steel plate, rusted by the damp air. As I look around, I notice that we aren’t in a mine, at least not like the ones I’ve read about. This isn’t a coal seam. A gold or silver mine. We’re surrounded by the undulating form of metamorphic rock. Granite. We’re in a quarry and it’s a good bet that it’s the one in Issaquah near where Leanne Delmont’s body was found.

Leaving her there was a taunt. An FU to his fellow law enforcement officials. I am so going to kill him when I get the chance. And when I do, I’m going to enjoy every moment of it. But with none of my weapons and the plan that would go with each, I’m unsure how any of this will go down.

“I’m sorry,” Mom repeats.

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault.” When I say that I mean it wasn’t her fault that she was abducted and raped and tortured. Not at all. But she holds some blame for my stepfather’s death and the life we’ve lived.

“Why didn’t you just call the police on him?” I ask, knowing the answer from Aunt Ginger, but still wanting to hear it from her lips.

“He
was
the police,’ she says. And then she looks at me and starts her side of the story.

COURTNEY SAT IN HER CAR
in front of her parents’ house, just outside of the Tacoma city limits. She turned off the ignition and watched as a vehicle crawled behind her. It had been four months since she’d reported her abduction. She was no longer at a regular high school, but attended an alternative school. Most of the kids enrolled were branded creative rebels but that’s not why she was there. Her issues were deep. Counselling eased some of the burden of what she’d been through. But not all of it. She revisited that place where she was held captive every night when she closed her eyes.

The car parked in the space next to hers.

The sight of him stunned and silenced her when all her mouth wanted to do was let out a scream. She swung the car door open and started to move as quickly as she could toward the front door of the house.

“Stop! Courtney!”

His voice was a command.

She turned to look at him and opened her mouth to scream but he was already on her with his hand over it.

His hot breath pulsed on her ear. “Say a word and I’ll kill your sister. Your parents too.”

She relaxed, not because she trusted him, but because she knew that fighting him would only give him more pleasure. That resistance and pain only brought him relief.

Even joy.

He caught her full attention and his fingertips slid downward to the gun clipped to his waistband. Previously, his weapons against her had been ropes, wires, and his body.

“I know what you are,” she said, her voice meek, subservient—and she hated that as much as she loathed him.

He touched her cheek and she stood there, frozen in fear.

“I know what you are,” he said. “You’re mine. I’ve marked you. You belong to me now.”

He was talking about the tattoo, and she reached for her shoulder. She had never shown it to anyone. Not Ginger. Not her folks. By ignoring it and never looking at it when she showered or changed clothes, she willed the tattoo, and the ordeal, away.

But she couldn’t right then. He was looking at her with those grotesque eyes. They penetrated. They degraded. They reminded her of what she had done to stay alive and how she got away. But mostly they were a reminder that he was out there. Hunting. Killing, probably.

“I could have killed you when I had you. I picked you on purpose. You were the perfect victim. Couldn’t have been better. The others were collateral. I saw your file. I knew your past. I knew that you were a liar and that no one would ever believe you. I can kill you right now.”

“Then do it,” she said.

He shook his head. “Not here. Not now. I’ll kill your sister first.”

She wanted to defy him and she tried with a threat. “I will
scream right now. Someone will come. I’ll tell them everything.”

“You already have,” he said, laughing. “No one believed you the first time. It’s the definition of mental illness  …  doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome.” He paused and watched her.“Are you crazy, Courtney? If you are, I don’t mind. I like crazy.”

“I will tell,” she sputtered out.

He shrugged. He knew the threat was an idle one.

“My word against yours. And if you make me mad, Ginger dies.”

She’d never said her sister’s name to him. Not once. Not when she’d cried in the darkness for help. Not a single time. But he knew Ginger’s name.

She took a step backwards from the driveway to the lawn. Her heel caught on the rubber landscape-edging and she fell, landing flat on her back. She was wearing a chambray fabric dress, thin and loose.

He frowned. “You’re  …  ” He bent down, his eyes on the already noticeable bump of her abdomen, and his eyes brightened. “Courtney. You have something for me?”

“Nothing,” she said, recoiling under his scrutiny. “Nothing for you.”

He smiled. His teeth shone white in the early evening and she remembered how he’d used them on her body; how he’d defiled her with his mouth while she was tied up, helpless, screaming in that quarry cavern that he’d turned into a kind of deranged bachelor pad. It had a bed. A lamp. It had a box of ropes, knives, needles, ink and wire.

“Let’s see what’s in my toy box today,” he’d told her the first night he’d taken her.

Courtney stood up, shivering on the cold, damp grass.

“I promise I won’t make trouble,” she said. “Just leave me alone. I will never tell again. Just go.”

She didn’t want to mention the baby. If he was uncertain at all, she was not going to confirm her condition. When the baby was born, she told herself, she’d give it up for adoption, to an agency with the strictest confidentiality policy.

A smile came to the monster’s lips and it took everything Courtney had to hold the contents of her stomach inside. She wanted to scream. She wanted to vomit. But she didn’t, of course. Because though she thought she could never love her baby, she knew that someone else could.

And that someone else would never be her abductor.

Her rapist.

Her baby’s father.

My father.

I SIT IN SILENCE AS my mother pauses and more jagged pieces of the ragged puzzle that was our life until barely a week ago fall into place. I am still mad at her, but I find myself clinging to her, comforting her. There is so much to know and if these are to be our last hours together then I need to show her love.

“How long before he comes back?” I ask, looking toward the steel door that holds us captive in this dark, scary place.

“Tomorrow. When you were unconscious and he brought you in here he said he’d be back tomorrow. He left some sandwiches and some ice tea.”

“Don’t drink the ice tea,” I say, urgency rising in my voice. “Marie made it.”

“Who’s Marie?” Mom asks, obviously confused.

“You don’t know about Marie?”

She shakes her head.

“His wife,” I say. “Alex Rader’s wife, Marie. I trusted her because she was in a wheelchair.”

A look overtakes my mother’s face. It is the kind of reaction that a kid makes when he looks up from a really hard math problem. The look that says something puzzling has finally been figured out.

Chapter Seventeen

Cash: None.

Food: Two tunafish sandwiches.

Shelter: Cave.

Weapons: Rocks.

Plan: Get ready.

THE WOMAN IN THE WHEELCHAIR was struggling to get it up over the curb.

Courtney had missed the bus at school and was making the long walk home. While waiting at the crosswalk for the light to change, she couldn’t help but notice the young woman in the wheelchair trying to get wherever she was going to.

“Do you need a hand?” she asked.

The woman looked over her shoulder and nodded. She is blond, pretty and only a few years older than Courtney.

As Courtney got closer the woman in the chair started to cry.

“This just isn’t right,” she said.

“Let me help you.”

The moment was awkward because the woman wouldn’t—or couldn’t—stop crying.

“I never should have imagined I could manage out here on my own,” she said between sobs. “It’s too hard. All of this.”

“I’m sorry,” Courtney said. She thought a moment and said something truthful and to the point. “Look, I don’t even know what to say here. I don’t know if I should say you’ll be all right or that you’ll get there or what? All I can think of is that I’m sorry.”

The woman looked up at her.

“I appreciate that,” she said. “I’ve been in this chair for a while now and I’m still getting used to it. Sometimes I just need a little push.”

“I can do that,” Courtney said, gripping the back of the chair.

“My car’s over there.” The woman indicated the far reaches of the parking lot. “I guess I can manage now.”

Courtney didn’t stop. She didn’t need to hurry home, and doing something nice for someone else was a big part of who she was.