Page 48 of The Intruder

NOW

CASEY

I brace myself for the flash of blinding pain—the sting of the blade entering my flesh, the blood dripping down my neck. I have spent the last two hours expecting this, but that doesn’t make it any less horrific.

Except strangely enough, I don’t feel any of that.

What I do feel is that I can now move my ankles. That’s when I realize Eleanor has cut the duct tape binding my legs and chest to the chair.

“You let me go,” I breathe.

Obviously, she changed her mind. Maybe after I saved her life, she decided not to torture me after all.

Eleanor comes around the side of the chair. “Doesn’t look like people come by here much, and I don’t want you to die. I’m sure you can eventually get your arms free.”

With those words, she picks up her bag from the floor. She takes one last look around the living room, then she cracks open my front door. She stands there for a moment, staring at what I’m sure is the wreckage of my yard, a flicker of naked fear on her smooth features.

“Are you leaving?” I call out.

She whips her head around to sneer at me. “Wow, how did you guess?”

I was certain Eleanor bound me to the chair with the intention of torturing me. I spent the last two hours imagining my slow and agonizing death. And now not only has she not done that, but she has given me a way to get free. And now she’s leaving.

Five minutes ago, I would have given anything to be cut free like this, but now that I see Eleanor walking out the door, I realize I have failed her.

I betrayed her trust, and now she’s disappearing into the wilderness all alone.

What will happen to her? What if she meets someone even worse than the person who put out their cigarettes on her skin?

“Wait!” I say. “Can we talk for a minute?”

She stares at me in disbelief. “Talk? You want to talk?”

She’s still got that switchblade in her right hand. My gun may very well be in her backpack. She’s extremely dangerous. And yet…

“It’s not safe to walk around out there,” I say. “Lots of fallen branches. Lots of mud, and all you’ve got are your sneakers.”

Again, a look of uncertainty crosses over her face, but she shakes it off. “I’ll be fine.”

“Take my boots then,” I offer her.

She looks down at my bare feet. “They won’t fit me.”

That’s probably true. But I take it as a plus that she even considered it. “Let me at least make you some breakfast before you go.”

“Why? So you can wait for the phone lines to come back on and then call the police?”

“No. I infinity promised I wouldn’t, remember?”

“That,” she says, “is bullshit, and you know it.”

I call out once again for her to wait, but she’s not listening. Instead, she walks out the front door, slamming it behind her—hard enough that the whole cabin shakes.

Damn.

Okay, I failed at getting through to Eleanor.

I’ll probably never see her again, and I just have to hope that the next person she comes across has a good heart.

As for the drawings in her notebook—well, I may never know why she drew those things.

But she didn’t actually hurt me. Not one hair on my head.

Now that my legs have been freed, I struggle to get into a standing position.

It takes some amount of effort, but I eventually manage to rise from the chair.

Of course, my wrists are still bound together, so I back up until I hit the kitchen counter.

Do you know how people say something is so easy, they could do it with their hands tied behind their back?

Well, I will definitely never be using that expression ever again.

Nothing is easy with your hands tied behind your back.

I manage to get the kitchen drawer open, and I’m about to feel around for a knife, but then I notice that the edge of the drawer is fairly sharp. I rub it against the duct tape around my wrist until I feel it start to give. I give it one good yank, and then I’m free.

My arms are free!

I spend about fifteen seconds rubbing the circulation back into my arms, and then I grab one of the flashlights I left on the kitchen table and make a beeline for my bedroom. I look around at the sloppy pile of blankets on my bed. But what I’m really interested in is the contents of my dresser.

I open that first drawer, feeling around inside. It’s not surprising that the gun hasn’t been returned. Eleanor must’ve taken it with her.

Great. But on the plus side, she didn’t shoot me with it.

I’m not entirely sure what to do next, so I strip the sheets off my bed and then put them in the laundry hamper—I’ll wash them once the power turns back on.

The sun has not yet peeked out from under the horizon, but at least the storm has calmed down.

It’s still raining, but it’s more of a drizzle.

Eventually, I’ve got to get in my truck and drive to the police station to let them know what happened.

I wish I had a last name or some other identifying information about Eleanor.

All I can tell them is that a girl named Eleanor with red hair and freckles and who was clearly abused, approximately middle school age, showed up at my cabin, threatened me, tied me up, and now she’s gone.

Maybe it will be enough if someone is looking for her, but if they aren’t, the information might be useless.

The power is still out. I pick up the phone, and I’m not surprised to find that the finicky phone lines are also still nonfunctional.

I plop down on the sofa, knowing that I need to get the fire going again because the cabin is an icebox, but I don’t have the energy. I feel like I could sleep all day.

I reach under the sofa cushion and pull out the green notebook that I found in Eleanor’s backpack. I shine the beam of the flashlight on the pages as I flip through them again. God, that girl has a disturbed mind.

I’m glad she never went through with doing any of these things to me. I still don’t understand why she decided to target me in the first place. What could I have done?

I turn to one of the pictures, and I happen to notice that the woman’s eyes are drawn as black circles.

I flip through more of the drawings, and this time I notice that the woman’s eyes are drawn the same way in each of the pictures.

And I also notice one other thing. In every drawing, Eleanor made a little dot just below the curve of the woman’s lips. Like a beauty mark.

Hmm. That’s strange. Why would she draw me that way?

The more I look at these drawings, the more I feel like I’ve made a terrible mistake. My stomach sinks. Now that Eleanor is gone and I’m no longer scared for my life, I become more and more certain:

The woman in these drawings is not me.

I have blue eyes, and although Eleanor clearly had access to blue ink, she did not draw them that way.

There is no beauty mark under my lips. And now that I’m looking more carefully, the woman’s nose is drawn as a sharp line, different from mine.

I allowed myself to panic, but there was no reason to.

Eleanor never envisioned my torture and death.

Her wrath was aimed at another woman. Someone who resembled me in scribble form.

That doesn’t mean I’m not worried about her. That doesn’t mean I’m not intensely concerned about the woman featured in these drawings. But that girl never wanted to hurt me. I scared myself over nothing.

Although it doesn’t explain the map leading to my home.

I flip through all the pages again under the beam of the flashlight. When I finally get to the end of the book, I discover a page I didn’t see the first time around. Possibly the most important page in the entire book. If she wanted the notebook back, it’s because of this page.

I stare at the contents of the paper, my head spinning. Oh my God. I finally understand.

This changes everything.