Don't Look for Me(31)

The man stares at me. Then he says, cheerfully, “Sure.”

I stand. I gather plates. My hand are full when a distinct sound stuns us all.

From the kitchen counter comes a ringing. The man’s cell phone. A call is coming in. A call reaching this house that he said has no reception.

I look at him now with disbelief as the weight of this information bears down against my chest. I can’t breathe.

“Looks like there’s service today,” I say. I wait for a reaction. He is still. There is no expression. The plates are in my hands. I stand between the man and his phone. I shift my weight toward the counter, toward the phone. My feet are still, but he senses something. My intentions. My desperation. My doubt.

If there is service in this house, then everything he’s told me could also be a lie. My car. My purse. The calls to my family. I slide one foot closer to the counter, and it’s now that he finally moves.

Slowly, he shakes his head back and forth. The shotgun rests, propped against a wall, within his reach. Alice holds a hand over her mouth, containing her fear. Or is it excitement?

I don’t think anymore. I drop the dishes and they crash to the floor. Alice gasps. The man jumps up.

I lunge for the phone and take it in my hand. I should run but I feel desperate to press that little green circle. Before I do, I am on the floor, the broken plates beneath me, scraping against my back. The man is on top of me, the weight of his body pressing me into the floor. Into the broken shards.

“Go to your room,” he says to Alice, and she scurries away.

His voice is stern but otherwise calm. He does not yell. He never yells. Even in the heat of this violent moment.

He takes the phone from my clenched hand. He takes it with no effort at all, peeling my fingers away with his fingers, as though all of my strength is not even a bother to him. My body fights now, arms and legs and torso and head, all writhing and flailing like a captured animal in the mouth of its predator.

Helpless.

His legs are outside my legs, pinning them together. His left hand holds both of my wrists as he props himself up and looks at the phone. I try to lift my head, teeth ready to clamp down on his flesh, but he is just out of reach. And he knows this. I can see on his face the satisfaction that he has secured his prey.

He uses his thumb to stop the call before it can be answered.

He slides the phone out of reach, across the kitchen floor. He leans his head in close to mine, his mouth brushes my ear.

“Are you wondering if that was your daughter? The one you didn’t kill?”

I freeze now. Terror. They know everything.

Not another word is spoken as he slides me across the floor, pieces of the plates digging into my skin.

He drags me by my arms, even as my legs kick and my body writhes to break free, twisting and turning in futility.

He drags me down the hall, past the guest room. Past Alice’s room and his room to the very end.

A door opens to the room that is cold and dark and has a hard tile floor.

The fear descends as he drags me inside and closes the door. I hear a dead bolt click into position on the other side.

It is then I know.

I am never leaving this house.





12


Day fourteen





Daisy Hollander.

Another woman who’d disappeared. Another woman who’d written notes to loved ones, telling them she’d walked away from her life. Nic thought about Daisy Hollander as she cradled a cup of coffee in her hands, looking out at the bar across the street.

Kurt had told her what he knew about the missing girl and her family. Eight children. Poverty. Dismal enough to draw out social services, and that was saying a lot for this part of the state, he’d said. Parents were long gone. He didn’t know where. All of the children had left as well. Except for one. A sister named Veronica.

She lived in the family’s old house in the deep part of the woods near the river, on land that was owned by the state. No one had tried to chase them off. He’d said he wondered if anyone from the state actually realized it. Nothing that happened in Hastings made much of a difference one way or another.

You’ll never find it, he’d told her.

Kurt had promised to take her when his shift ended.

Was that strange, she wondered now? That he didn’t just give her directions? That he’d brought it up at all? No one else had mentioned Daisy Hollander. Not even Chief Watkins.

The diner was close to empty, even at noon. Just one man at the counter, and an older woman in the back who came every day and stayed through dinner, reading books and sipping lemon water. Nic remembered her from the last time she was here. The diner was warm and the water was free. It made her think that Roger Booth was a generous man.

Nic waved to the same waitress from the morning who was leaning on the counter, reading something on her phone. Ignoring her. Nic had captured Officer Reyes’s attention, so now she would be punished with bad service. Cold coffee.

It was just like the girls in school. She had not been one of them. Not ever. And their petty jealousies had amused her. She’d been an athlete. An academic. She’d had her eye on the endgame, which was getting into college and finding her path in life. Her friends had been like-minded, a small pack of four or five of them, banding together against the invisible social ladder in their school. It was absurd how they were sorted out. Boys who played sports with sticks were at the top. Their girlfriends sat beside them on their thrones. Pretty blondes. Always. Nic was blond and some used to think she was pretty. But she didn’t have it in her to sidle up to a jock.