Page 7

C HAPTER 7

W hen I was six, my sister tied me to the swing set in our backyard. We were playing pirates, and I’d been captured and bound to the ship’s mast while she stowed my stolen treasure belowdecks. The mast was a metal pole; my bindings, a jump rope; my treasure, a plastic tiara and a slingshot; and belowdecks, the far end of the yard in the shade of the gardening shed. Libby had lost interest in our game and left me there, laced to the icy pole, until I began to cry.

My father heard me from over in the shed, where he was tinkering with our lawn mower, which he’d taken apart simply to study how it worked. When he approached me, wiping his hands on a greasy towel, I expected him to untie me and punish Libby with a lifetime of the worst-possible chores. But instead he examined the pink sparkly rope wound around my body, from ankles to shoulders, and nodded. He leaned in and wiped the tears from my cheeks with a callused thumb, which smelled like grease and grass, and said, “It’s just a puzzle, Penny. And you’re smart enough to solve anything.” He ruffled my hair with his big hand and went back to the shed.

I gaped at him in disbelief as I squirmed against my bindings. How dare he! I raged inside my little head. More tears boiled up and I thought of shouting for Mom, but decided trying to rescue myself would be less of a hassle. Once my vision cleared, I got to work assessing the situation and made a plan.

Libby had intentionally or carelessly, I’d never been sure, left my ankles looser than my arms. The pink rope bit into my shins, which already had plenty of scabs from the trips and falls customary of my childhood, but I managed to work one foot free and then the other. Once I had my knees free, I could shimmy down the pole to free my shoulders and eventually turn around to untie my hands.

Once I was loose, I ran across the yard, beaming, and triumphantly presented the tangled rope to my father. I got a tacit nod of approval in return—which was high praise from him.

He told me years later he’d never taken his eyes off me and had the pruning shears at the ready, but he knew I would find my way out.

That day in the backyard, in what had been a child’s game, my father imparted lasting wisdom to me. His voice became a refrain through my studies and career, through life in general. It’s just a puzzle, Penny. And you’re smart enough to solve anything. I’d heard it in the most trying times, and the sound of it always brought me back to the basics of that day: assess the situation; make a plan.

Little did my father or sister know, but that formative sunny day in the backyard would one day play out again in a much less innocent and edifying way. If only they’d prepared me for a head injury and shadowy isolated location, in addition to being bound, as part of my childhood lesson.

Now I tensed against my bindings. A far less friendly set of zip ties cinched my ankles to the legs of an uncomfortable chair and bound my wrists behind my back, making me long for a sparkly jump rope. A gag filled my mouth and was tied behind my head. An axe had been driven into my temple, surely. The place where I’d been hit throbbed furiously. The vision in my left eye had only now recovered.

The gap between Lou’s office and wherever I was now was a gray blur, with the mental visibility of a blizzard. I’d come to as I was being pulled out of a car, but only long enough to blink at unfamiliar surroundings, desperately struggle in a panic, and be whacked in the head again. The second whack must have been harder than the first because a full lifetime could have passed between then and now. I’d lost all sense of space and time. The only way I knew we were in the same century? I was still wearing the same dress and heels I’d worn to the funeral, and my head injury was fresh enough to ache.

“Ouch,” I muttered against the gag, and winced all over again. Lifting my hands to check was out of the question, but I knew if I could reach for my forehead, a large lump would be there to greet me.

I took a breath to curb the panic licking at me like flames.

I was somewhere underground. The claustrophobic feeling I always got in parking garages squeezed in on me. The air hung colder and thinner, as if in a reminder I was someplace I wasn’t supposed to be able to breathe, and everything above could crumble and bury me alive. I shivered at the thought. The walls and floor were a continuous shade of concrete. One boxy pillar stood guard in the middle of the floor, holding up the ceiling. A staircase cascaded from the top right corner of the room. A stack of chairs similar to the one I was sitting in stood in the opposite corner.

I considered shouting for help, but even without a gag in my mouth, I wasn’t sure anyone would hear me, and if anyone could, they likely were not the type of visitor I wanted.

I struggled against my bindings again, feeling the zip ties bite into my skin. My ankles stung already. My arms ached from the angle.

It’s just a puzzle, Penny.

I wiggled my feet, thinking if I could kick off my heels, I could slip my feet free, but it was no use. Whoever had tied me up knew what they were doing. My wrists were chafed. I’d have to dislocate a shoulder to get an arm free. That, or tip the chair over and hope it landed at the right angle to snap one of its legs. In all likelihood, tipping would only succeed in hurting me.

I closed my eyes and listened as hard as I could, but the concrete walls may well have been soundproofed. All I heard was my own heartbeat, which I was struggling to keep calm.

Think.

A plan for escape felt futile. I didn’t even know where I was. The blip of memory from before being whacked in the head for a second time only contained flashes of a car’s interior and what could have been a garage. I’d been driven inside, possibly already underground, and then carried deeper underground.

Was I in a house? An office building? A secret compound? On a boat?

The last option was the only thing I was sure could not be true. Wherever I was, it was most certainly on land.

A door opened in the distance, shooting a shaft of light down the stairs. I tensed as footsteps carried down the concrete with soft scrapes. Given the shape of the room, it took half the staircase for me to be able to see the person’s legs, and the whole thing for me to recognize the man in the tweed jacket.

“Hi, Dr. Collins,” he said as he approached me. “Glad to see you’re awake.” He held a tablet in his hands and tapped his fingers across it before locking the screen and holding it behind his back. He leaned over and spoke to me as if I were a child. “Before I remove your gag, I want you to understand no one can hear you if you scream, so there is no use. Also, if you try to bite me, I will be forced to knock you out again. Understand?”

Bite him? I silently wondered if I might have attempted that during one of the blank spots in my memory.

“Do you understand?” he repeated, slower and louder.

I glared at him, insulted, and nodded.

“Good girl,” he said with the same sinister purr from when he grabbed me in the office. He set the tablet on the floor a short distance away from me and slowly reached for the rag tied around my mouth.

The cottony cloth had absorbed all the moisture from my tongue. I coughed and smacked my lips, trying to bring it back. “Can I have some water?”

He considered me with a tilt of his head. “That depends.”

“On what?”

He placed his arms behind his back again and began to pace in front of me. Once more, I felt like defenseless prey trapped in a cage with a predator—except this time, it was literal. “On how useful you are.”

I tensed against my bindings again. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re here for a reason, and now it’s only a matter of time.”

I frowned at his cryptic response. “A matter of time until what?”

“I think you know.”

“I promise you, I truly do not.”

He sighed and reached for the tablet. He poked at it to find something that must have already been saved on it, because I couldn’t imagine a Wi-Fi signal penetrating these concrete walls. And on that thought, I realized I had no idea where my phone was. I’d had a clutch at the funeral and could not say what had happened to it once we left the office. In all likelihood, my phone was smashed to pieces on the side of the road somewhere and my ID burned.

I ached at the thought of my sister. She must have been terrified and worried sick.

The tweed man found what he was looking for and flipped the tablet around to face me.

The photo of me and Anthony from the news, the one of him catching me on the curb outside the police station, stared back at me.

I groaned and rolled my eyes. “ Seriously? For the hundredth time, I am not his girlfriend. I’m just a professor! I teach undergrads how to code! I’m only trying to make tenure!” I struggled against my bindings like a prisoner raging in their cell. “I don’t even know him!”

“No? Then why did he tell me he’d kill me if I hurt you?”

“Because he—what?” My heart thudded in my ears as the gravity of what he said took hold.

He leaned closer with another smug smile. “Yes. That morning I was outside his house, he told me if I so much as spoke to you, he’d hunt me down, and if I laid a finger on you, then he would have no choice but to kill me. Now, why would someone be so fiercely protective of someone they didn’t know?”

My jaw had fallen off its hinges. My mouth popped shut and back open a few times, but no sound came out. I was a dummy with no ventriloquist.

The tweed man’s voice dropped to a low purr as he leaned in even closer. “I knew from the moment I saw you two the day of the estate sale, the spark that went off like a firecracker there in the foyer, that you would become a key piece in this little game we’re playing.”

I was reeling from so many things, but one realization hit me over the head like a falling star. “It was you. You told the cops I was his girlfriend that day.”

He straightened his posture and quietly laughed again. “I never talked to the police that day, but glad to hear my impression was corroborated.”

My mind was a complete haze—not simply from being hit in the head multiple times in the recent past.

Anthony had threatened to kill this man? Over me ?

What game were they playing?

And for the love of all that was holy, what goddamned spark was everyone talking about?

A vision of Anthony hiding me in his closet flashed in my mind; his arms circled around me, holding me. Then there was the way he held a hammer, the sweaty J, that night in his pajamas, the way he looked in a suit at the funeral.

A warmth unfurled in my belly. I got the urge to cross my legs, but my feet were tied so my knees were spread, which only made the ache burn deeper.

It was all complicated. The thoughts felt like dozens of puzzle pieces that refused to fit together. I shook my head, trying to make sense of something, but that only made my wounded temple throb.

“Look, I don’t know why Anthony said those things to you. We are not a couple. As far as I know, he’s wrapped up in murdering Portia with the rest of you psychos. Please, I just want to go home.”

Uttering Portia’s name shifted the air, as if someone had opened a window and pumped in a cold blast. The tweed man’s demeanor completely changed. His face grew serious, almost studious.

“What do you know about Portia?”

Here we go again, I thought. This woman held such power over all of them. Like they were ready to lie down and die for information on her.

“Only what I’ve seen online and on TV,” I said vaguely.

The answer did not sit well with him. His eyes narrowed into pinpricks, and he leaned in. “Where is she?”

I flinched from his sudden invasion of my space. I had nowhere to go, but I leaned back as much as possible. “I assume in a shallow grave or at the bottom of the bay by now, but I should be asking you that question.”

He chewed on his lip and mulled my answer. His tablet dinged from his hand. When he looked at it, his face lit up. “Ah, well. Looks like our guest of honor has finally arrived. It’s about time. This should be fun to watch.” In a swift and unnerving move, he circled behind me and looped his arms over my head to hold the tablet so I could see the screen.

A black-and-white security image played out, and revealed Anthony.

I sucked in a sharp breath.

He wore his customary all black and crept along what appeared to be the outside of a wall. Based on the dim light, night had fallen.

Another wave of worry rolled through me. If it was dark outside, I’d been gone for at least seven hours. Poor Libby must have been out of her mind worried.

The tweed man poked the screen to enlarge the image. His breath slid down my neck, as if a pitcher of warm water had been poured. We watched as Anthony scaled a stone wall with the ease of a cat. Where I would have needed a boost, only to get high-centered with a leg on either side and then fall into a heap of broken bones, he jumped up and grabbed the top of it to pull himself over like it was nothing.

“Ha!” the tweed man chuckled, impressed.

I had to admit, it was impressive.

But the daring athletics aside, I realized we were watching a video of Anthony breaking into the place where I was being kept. And the tweed man had been expecting him.

He circled back in front of me and gave me a serious look. “This place is surrounded, but everyone has instructions not to interfere until he gets to you,” he said while he tapped at his tablet. “You aren’t going to do anything foolish when he comes down here to find you, are you?”

I blinked at him as it struck me with a startling realization what role I was playing in all this.

Bait.

They didn’t want me; they wanted him. And I was the leverage to get to him.

People like me can’t really afford to get close to others. It creates leverage. Anthony had said those words to me that night in his kitchen. When we had crossed the line into close enough for him to come rescue me, I couldn’t be sure, but here we were.

I stared up at the tweed man, wanting to scream. For help, in fury, to warn Anthony. He was about to walk into a trap, and I had no idea the tweed man’s intentions, once he was caught in it, but they couldn’t have been good.

I decided it was in my best interest to cooperate until further notice.

I nodded.

“Good girl,” he said with a wink. He wedged the tablet between his knees so he could reach for my gag and shove it back up into my mouth.

My heart thrummed with the enthusiasm of a hummingbird’s wings. The tweed man moved to the corner to watch his tablet, and I could only assume to monitor Anthony’s progress in locating me. I tried to count. Why? I didn’t know, but numbers often soothed me, and I thought perhaps knowing how long it took Anthony to get to me would somehow help us escape on the other end of whatever was going to happen.

I got to fifty-five when the tweed man locked the tablet’s screen and stepped back completely into the shadow. Given where he stood, flat against the far wall opposite me and adjacent to the staircase, there was no way Anthony would see him when he came down the stairs.

I was bait in a pool of light, a slab of meat in a cage with an open door, and I hoped Anthony had the sense to recognize the scene for what it was.

Another thirty seconds passed before the door at the top of the stairs opened again. The beam of light spilled down so gradually that he must have been opening the door inches at a time. I heard the first cautious footstep, and then another. His shadow tumbled over the steps, long and broad from the light behind him.

At the sound of his voice, deep and secret and soft, my whole body went tingly with simultaneous fear and relief. “Penny?”

I tensed, wishing I could warn him about the monster in the shadow.

His legs came into view first. Then his outstretched arms, holding a gun in his hands. I flinched at the sight of it. By the time I could see his chest and shoulders, he’d reached the bottom of the stairs. When he saw me, he sagged with visible relief.

“Penny!” My name was a lyric on his lips. He shoved his gun into his waistband and strode over to me.

I shook my head and threw my eyes at the tweed man in warning, but he was too busy hurrying to my side. He lifted an intimidating knife from his jeans and snapped it open while he squatted at my feet.

“I’m so glad I found you. I’m so sorry.” He reached for my ankle, his hands a hot flash on my skin, as the tweed man crept out of the shadow behind him.

I jerked and kicked against my bindings; I screamed at the gag, but only succeeded in garbled nonsense.

Anthony looked up at me with a vulnerable empathy in his eyes. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

The words weren’t even out of his mouth before the tweed man clubbed him in the back of the head, and he collapsed at my feet.