I spoke for hours. Nurses came, checked vitals, adjusted monitors, then scurried away. Dark agents appeared in the doorway, only to be hastily dismissed. I don’t know. I couldn’t take it in, the room, the equipment, the endless interruption of bodies. I kept my body ramrod straight, hands at my side, gaze on the overhead lights, and I talked, and I talked, and I talked.
First a whisper. Then louder, steadier. Then . . . maybe I ended in a scream.
I don’t really remember, to tell you the truth. It was like an out-of-body experience. All this horror I had to get out of me, and the only way to do that was to talk and talk and talk.
When I finally reached the end, midnight, small hours of the morning, Samuel staggered to his feet. His face was covered in a sheen of sweat. He didn’t look so beautiful anymore.
His breath was ragged, as if he himself had just completed a long, hard race.
He made it to the bathroom. I listened to him vomit.
When he returned, however, his gleaming bald head was polished, his features once again composed.
He took my hand. He held it.
And I slept. Hours and hours, maybe even an entire day. I finally slept. When I woke up, my mother and brother were there and the real business of returning to the land of the living began.
I kept my word that day. I’ve never told my story again. Not to the detectives, not to the rabid prosecutor, not to my own mother. Samuel must’ve turned in a report; that was his job after all. I’ve never asked. I’ve never read it. I said all I had to say, all I could say, once, and then it was done.
The nice thing about my captor, Jacob Ness, being dead is that there’s no one to rebut. My story is the story.
And both Samuel and I know it.
“Why did you go out last night?” Samuel asks me now. He eases up on the accelerator; we’re nearing my Arlington apartment.
“I’m a young, single woman. People my age are supposed to go out at night.”
“Alone to a bar?”
“The band was excellent.”
He cast me a look.
“I didn’t lie to the police,” I hear myself say. “The bartender was as much a surprise to me as everyone else. If I hadn’t been there . . .”
Samuel pauses a beat. Shrinks love a good waiting game.
“You killed a man.”
“Please. That Goulding guy would’ve attacked someone else, and that girl would now be dead. I saved a life last night.”
“And saving this abstract girl has value?”
“Absolutely!”
“What about your own life? Doesn’t it have value?”
I roll my eyes. I totally set him up for that one and we both know it. “You can’t count that as a display of superior intellect,” I inform him. “More like basic reflex.”
He ignores my sarcasm, continues more pointedly: “I believe your mother would argue that, given a choice between worrying about you and worrying about a stranger, she’d prefer to know you’re safe.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. Or maybe I have too much. Such as, what does it matter? I could stay in every night for the rest of my life and my mother still wouldn’t be happy. In fact, maybe she’d be better off if I finally did go out and meet a grand demise. Get the waiting game over with. Because, as my mother will tell you, there are worse things than having your daughter abducted.
There’s getting her back and realizing you’ve lost her after all.
“You shouldn’t have called her,” I say now.
“But you knew I would.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Just ask Devon Goulding?”
“I did what I had to do!”
“No,” Samuel retaliates just as sharply. “You set up what you wanted. There’s a difference.”
I fall back into silence. We arrive at the three-story brownstone that houses my single-bedroom apartment. Samuel pulls into the driveway—temporary parking and a signal that he’s not staying, just dropping me off.
“The local police are looking at you now,” he says quietly.
“Nah. That was just posturing. Blondie didn’t have a real perpetrator to arrest, so naturally she toyed with me. But I’m telling you, by the time they’re done shaking down that house, they’ll find evidence of other victims. Then, they’ll have real work to do and I’ll fall by the wayside, just a curious footnote in the case file.”
Samuel looks at me. He has deep dark eyes fringed by heavy lashes. I imagine women must fall in love with him every day, gazing into those eyes, fantasizing about him staring back at them just as soulfully.
It’s a bunch of effort wasted on a man who never does anything but work.
“You survived,” he tells me now, “by doing what you had to do. By adapting. That’s the nature of survival, Flora, and you know it.”
I don’t say anything.
“You’re strong and that helped you, but this doesn’t have to define you. You are a young woman with your whole life ahead of you. Don’t confuse what you had to do to survive with who you are.”
“A woman who takes on rapists?”
“Is that how you see yourself?”
He’s waiting. He wants a better definition, a deeper look into myself. Am I a vigilante? A self-destructive freak? How about a self-defense enthusiast?
Maybe I’m all of those things. Maybe I’m none of those things.
Maybe I’m a girl who once upon a time thought of the world as a shiny, happy place.
And now . . .
I’m a girl who went missing too many years ago. And remained away from home and from herself for way too long.
“My mother’s waiting,” I say.
And he smiles, because Samuel, of all people, understands exactly what I mean.
“Sorry about your seat,” I say as I climb out of his car.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to take it out and burn it.”
My turn to smile.
“Are you working with Stacey Summers’s family?” I ask him abruptly.
He shakes his head. “Are you?” he asks evenly.
“You know that’s not my style.”
“But you’re following her case.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
Samuel flexes his hands on the wheel. “Do you think he did it?” he asks abruptly. “Do you think the man you just killed is the same person who kidnapped Stacey Summers in August?”
“I want to think that.”
“So you can feel better about what you did.”
“No. Opposite, in fact. If he’s the one who attacked Stacey . . . He’s dead now. Not exactly in a position to lead the police to her body. It’d be better, in fact, if it wasn’t him. At least for her family.”
“So why are you asking about Stacey Summers?”
I open my mouth. I close my mouth. There are things I can’t say, not even to Samuel.
I glance up, my gaze going to the top window of the brownstone and the outline of my mother waiting for me there.
“Thank you, Samuel,” I hear myself say.
I close the door. He backs out of the driveway.
Then, my real work begins.
Chapter 10
DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT OF HOMICIDE Cal Horgan, a.k.a. D.D.’s boss, stood in her doorway.
“Heard you got a live one,” he said.
“We’re still working the scene, but yeah, at first blush . . . The deceased, Devon Goulding, was most likely a serial predator. We recovered two driver’s licenses, not to mention a cache of photos, which seems to indicate other victims.”
“Stacey Summers?” Horgan asked immediately, the missing college student being first and foremost on most law enforcement agents’ minds.
Given the terrible abduction video and urgent nature, the Summers case had gone straight to “red ball” status, detective-speak for all hands on deck. While D.D. wasn’t the lead investigator, she’d spent the first week of the girl’s disappearance conducting interviews and combing through reports with the rest of her colleagues. Her biggest contribution: spending several days interrogating the girl’s boyfriend. All she got out of it was a young man’s horror. Though Patrick Vaughn and Stacey had been dating only a matter of months, he was clearly smitten. Far from playing it cool, he’d broken down several times. Stacey was such a sweet girl. The real deal. Thoughtful, considerate, the kind of girl who’d never dream of running off or doing anything to hurt her family.
If she’d gone missing, then only the worst could’ve happened.