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The man pushes off the bed. “I gotta tell you, Jade, I wasn’t expecting you to be this accommodating, not with that temper of yours. Remember when you lost your shit after the valet couldn’t find the key to your car? You threatened to have him fired.”
Oh, I remember. We were trying out a new sitter, a friend of a friend of a friend’s nanny, a high-strung girl who had just called in a panic after Baxter projectile vomited his spaghetti dinner over the antique Beni Ourain and was running a 102-degree temperature. Cam was in the kitchen, cooking for a CEO roundtable, leaders of Atlanta’s Fortune 500s crammed into the private room, and his truck was in the shop. With my car stuck in the lot, it took me twice as long to get home in an Uber.
But the bigger point is thatheremembers, which means he was there. He saw me throw that fit.
A Lasky employee, then? A client?
“Tell you what,” he says when I don’t respond. “Let’s stick a pin in this subject for now. Just until I get back, so...don’t move, okay?” He laughs—another stupid, pathetic joke. “Hang tight while I go check on the kids.”
As soon as he’s gone, I lurch forward at the waist and tug at the rope with my teeth. The guy is smart, positioning the knot on the far side of my wrist, too far for me to reach with my mouth, so my first task is to somehow rotate the rope until the knot is on top. I bite and pull, bite and pull, nudging the rope along with little flicks of my wrist. It drags over the skin of my arm in millimeter increments, painful and excruciatingly slow.
Words float in disconnected fragments across the hall.
...Mommy...talk to her...very important.
Bax again, speaking in Baxter code. The more trifling the request, the more urgently it is delivered. He wants to tell me about a pretty blue bird that’s perched on the windowsill, probably, or an unreachable itch in the center of his back. How long have we been upstairs—twenty minutes at the most? Even with the cartoons blaring, it’s long past the limit for a six-year-old to sit still and be quiet. The question is, how much will the masked man tolerate?
The man’s voice comes in a low murmur, too faint for me to hear.
I work at the ties and do the math. My watch says it’s a few minutes before 4:30—a little more than a half hour until the banks close and two and a half hours before Cam’s deadline. Whoever this man is across the hall, whatever he thinks he knows about my husband, I wonder what he knows about the restaurant business. Three-quarters of a million dollars is a lot to have just lying around, liquid cash Cam could stuff in a bag when his system is geared to cashless transactions, credit cards and Apple Pay and touchless payment apps. Even if Cam raided all the tip jars and valet stands, there’s no way he’d get anywhere close. He’s going to have to make a trip to the bank.
Questions beat through my mind like razor blades.
Who is this guy? A fired waiter? A bartender or chef? He’s stronger than me, faster, too. Even if I managed to wriggle myself loose from this chair, can I sneak across the hall and surprise him with the lucite bowl to the temple? Can I kick the gun from his hand and then use it to shoot him in the face?
And then, darker, more dangerous thoughts: three-quarters of a million dollars is alot. What if Cam can’t get to the bank in time? What happens to us then?
For a bleak moment, I think about how the kids and I will end this day. How difficult Cam’s task is, how helpless and outmatched I am stuck to this damn chair. One false move, and the man could kill everyone in this house—bang bang bang—and still have bullets left over for Cam when he arrives. Maybe that’s been his plan all along, to kill us, then take the money and run. Maybe this whole afternoon is just part of his evil game.
By now my right wrist is slick with spit, and the knot has rotated a good inch. Only a half inch more and then—
Beatrix’s scream pierces the upstairs hallway.
S E B A S T I A N
4:27 p.m.
Confession time. This Beatrix kid is a pain in my ass.
Her little brother, Baxter, I can manage. That kid is just begging for some attention, which I pretend to give him while he rambles on about the pair of squirrels fighting over an acorn in the yard. Unsurprisingly, the big one won.
But Beatrix’s scream was meant to piss me off and blow out my eardrums. And what a scream it was, one of those top-of-the-lungs, glass-shattering shrieks made for a horror movie soundtrack, loud and high enough to echo around my skull. The dull throbbing behind my mask is just painful enough to be distracting.
And the remote, which I’d stuck in her hand after duct taping her arms to the armrests, she somehow manages to hurl across the room like a Frisbee. That’s what Baxter called me over for, to tell me the channel needed changing and Beatrix had accidentally dropped the remote on the floor.
I take in the distance from her fingertips to the remote, lying upside down by the far wall. Eleven feet, maybe more, and pitched high enough to clear the coffee table. All that, with one flick of her wrist. I hate to admit it, but it’s impressive, really. Somebody sign this kid up for baseball.
But still.
That doesn’t change the fact that Beatrix is trouble. That stubborn act of defiance downstairs in the kitchen, the remote, her feral scream just now. She might be skinny, but she’s a spitfire with a vicious streak to go with that ridiculous hair. On a normal day, I bet she’s a handful.
And that finger tapping. A constant and random rapid-fire drumming of her left hand. A nervous tic? Some kind of secret code? I check in with her brother, who’s staring openmouthed at the TV. Completely oblivious.
Across the hall, Jade blubbers for her daughter, begging Beatrix to tell her what’s wrong, assuring her that everything’s okay. It’s a lie, of course. Jade knows that everything isnotokay. Not even close. Not unless Super Cam can swoop in and save the day.
“Beatrix,please,” Jade hollers from across the hall. “Answer me! What’s happening over there?”
Beatrix lies on her plush leather recliner like a slug, her glare stuck to the ceiling. Chest heaving, limbs splayed, slack at the ankles and the forearms where they’re pinned down by multiple layers of duct tape.