“Stop,” he commanded. I stood there in the dark. I listened as he urinated once again. He mumbled to himself. “We’re going to wait here until daylight.” He seemed to be thinking to himself. Was he getting tired? Were we really just going to sit there on the rocks until the sun came up?
I turned around to look at him. He was not very tall, with narrow shoulders and a slim chest. It was too dark to see much more than just the outline of his body, and his beard hid most of his face, but I could see his cheeks and eyes. Then it hit me. I remembered him! I had seen him once—no, twice—before. Once when I was shopping downtown with my mother. Sometime in the fall. She had given him a little money. She had given him my dad’s name and cell-phone number so that they could help him more. My father had hired him to do some handiwork. Just before Thanksgiving, I thought. I also remembered watching him from the upstairs railing that looks down on our front hall. He had looked up to see me watching him while he was waiting to get paid.
“Why are you doing this?” I pleaded. “My parents were only trying to help you.”
“You are my hostage,” he replied. “You’ll learn. I’ll tell you what you need to know when we get where we are going.”
“My parents never hurt you. Why are you doing this?”
“All will be made known in due time.”
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer.
“My parents will pay any amount of money to get me back. Anything you ask for.”
Again, he didn’t answer. Though he claimed I was his hostage, he showed no interest in talk of ransom or any money. He stood there in the darkness without responding in any way, the long knife in his hand. He gestured farther up the mountain. “My wife is waiting up there,” he said.
Might he only want a daughter? I wondered. The idea tumbled inside my head.
I soon discovered that being taken to be his daughter was an enormously optimistic hope.
He pointed up the mountain. It was steep. So rough. Looking at it, I realized we’d have to crawl in places. Dawn was getting closer now. The sky was still dark, but the eastern horizon was turning a hint of gray. Moving closer to me, he repeated, “If you try to run, I will catch you. Do exactly what I say, or I will kill you. I have friends. They will kill your family. Your little sister. All the others. If you try to escape … if you do anything that I don’t tell you, I will kill you and your family.”
I felt his breath upon me.
“Do you understand?”
I understood. And I believed him. He stared at me, then grunted. “Let’s go.”
I turned and started crawling up the mountain once again.
6.
Mary Katherine
My younger sister, Mary Katherine, remembers being wakened by a nudge. But she figured it was just me and drifted back to sleep. Seconds later, she was jolted fully awake when she realized that I was climbing out of bed. Opening her eyes, she saw a stranger standing there! Taking her older sister. Holding a long knife to my chest!
A large, uncovered window let some light into the room, shadows of darkness cast by the stars and the moon. Mary Katherine watched what was happening through half-open eyes, pretending to be asleep, her heart racing in her chest. The man stayed very close to me, pushing me toward the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” she heard me ask. The answer was too muffled to really understand. Hostage? Maybe “hitchhike”? She didn’t know what he said. But she did pick up on “kill” and “your family,” and was even more terrified. She watched as I moved toward the bathroom, the stranger right beside me. The door shut. Light seeped into the bedroom from underneath the door. Very muffled voices. A few minutes passed. The light went out. The door opened. Quiet footsteps. A floorboard creaking. The sound of muffled movement in the hall.
And then quiet. Deadly quiet.
Mary Katherine was utterly petrified, frozen stiff with fear. And how could she not be! She was a nine-year-old girl who had just witnessed her older sister being taken from her bed by a stranger with a long beard and a knife, a man who had hissed and pulled and held her so close that she could not get away!
It was just too much to manage.
My nine-year-old sister lay underneath her covers, too terrified to even move. She hardly dared to breathe. She was in a deep state of shock, completely numb with fear.
An agonizing amount of time passed. She didn’t sleep. The grandfather clock chimed downstairs. Still, she didn’t move. More time passed. How long, she didn’t know. The shadows traced the movement of the moon across her bedroom wall. The clock chimed again. She poked her head out from the covers. Starlight and moonlight filtered into the room. Yellow. Dull. She reached across the blankets to the left side of the bed. The sheets were flat and cool. I was not there.
Finally, in a moment of courage, she grabbed her baby blanket, pulled it over her head, and bolted toward my parents’ room.
It was a few minutes before four in the morning.
I had been gone for hours.
*