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I take another step.
Then another, which creaks under my weight, the sound startling me.
It’s followed by another creak.
Not from me.
From somewhere deeper in the basement.
I hurry down the remaining steps, into the basement, which is lit by asingle exposed bulb dangling from the ceiling. The basement is bare-bones. Cement floor. Concrete walls. The steps I’d just descended nothing more than a skeleton of wood.
I take another step, my field of vision expanding, revealing junk crowded at the edges of the basement. Castoffs from Mrs. Fitzgerald’s antique business. Chipped dressers and chairs missing legs and boxes stacked upon boxes.
Pushed against the wall is an old-fashioned brass bed that has something on top of it.
No.
Not something.
Someone.
I creep closer and see—
Oh, God.
Katherine.
Her clothes are the same ones I saw her wearing the night she vanished. Jeans and a white sweater, now stained in spots. Her shoes are gone, revealing bare feet made dirty by the trek from her house to this one. A line of soup, still wet, drips from a corner of her mouth onto her neck.
But it’s her arms that unnerve me the most.
They’ve been lifted above her and connected to the brass bed’s corners by rope knotted around her wrists. I see more rope at her ankles, keeping her spread-eagled atop a plastic tarp that’s been laid over the mattress.
I choke out a gasp.
Katherine hears it and her eyes flutter open. She looks up at me, at first utterly confused, then full-blown panicked.
“Who—”
She stops herself, still looking, her large, frightened eyes softening into recognition.
“Casey?” Her voice is weird. Hoarse and slightly wet, as if there’s water in the back of her throat. It doesn’t sound like her at all. “Is it really you?”
“It’s me. It’s me and I’m going to help you.”
I rush to her, putting a hand on her forehead. Her skin is cold and clammy with sweat. And pale. So startlingly pale. Her lips have become cracked with dryness. She parts them and croaks, “Help me. Please.”
I reach for the rope knotted around her right wrist. It’s been tied tight. The skin under it has been rubbed raw, and dried blood flakes off the rope.
“How long have you been down here?” I say. “Why did Tom do this to you?”
I give up on untying the rope around her wrists and instead move to the end lashed to the brass railing. It, too, is knotted tight, and I tug at it helplessly.
But there’s a noise.
Near the stairs.
An unnaturally loud creak as someone pushes off the bottom step.