Authors: Paullina Simons
“No,” Amanda said. He heard wrestling with the phone, and then screams from Amanda.
“God, these children,” his mother said. “So, how is everything? Are you in the hospital?”
“No, Mom, listen, I have to talk to you, somethingâ”
“What?” Barbara Wood said. “What's wrong? Has there been some kind of accident?”
“You could say that, Mom. Didi's been kidnapped.” There. He just came out and said it.
“What do you mean?” Rich's mother said. “I don't understand.”
“I don't either, Mom, but some man took her from NorthPark.”
“What man?” his mother asked shrilly.
“We don't know.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh. My. God.”
“Mom, please, the girls, please.” He heard his mother's calm voice breaking down. “Mom, the girls!” he exclaimed. “Justâpleaseâfor them.”
It seemed to take his mother minutes to stop crying, and all Rich could do was whisper, “Mom, the girls.”
“Oh, God help us, what are we going to do?”
“We're going to find her, Mom. There are two FBI men outside the house in a car, just in case he comes by, or if you need anything.”
“What am I possibly going to need from them? What if he calls here?”
“The phone's been forwarded to FBI headquarters, so they can trace his location.” Rich heard pained breathing on the other end. “Please try to calm down. I don't want the kids to get scared.”
“Scared? Scared? Listen, I've locked myself in the bathroom, the kids can't hear me. But they've got every right to be scared.”
“No, it's all going to turn out okay, and I don't want to panic them.”
“Panic them? Richard, all Reenie's been saying is when's Mommy coming home? They're hungry.”
“So feed them, Mom.”
“Reenie doesn't want anyone cooking her dinner but Didi. She threw a fit when I touched that steak.”
“So don't feed them the steak. Feed them macaroni and cheese.”
“They don't want macaroni and cheese. Manda knows her mom was going to make steak, and that's what she wants.”
“Oh, for God's sake!”
Rich kept the phone to his ear. “Mom,” he said in a low voice. “I'm asking you please to take care of them, please, as best as you can. Don't tell them anything.”
“Richard, what am I going to tell them when they ask where their mommy is?”
“Tell them mommy is trying to have a baby, and Grandma is going to take care of them tonight.”
“And what ifâ”
“Mom!” he exclaimed. “I don't want to hear this from you. Say a prayer if you've got five seconds free. I'll call as soon as I have any news.”
When Rich hung up, he thought, well, that was as bad as I thought it was going to be.
5:30 P.M.
Lyle finally found a pawnshop in Valley Mills, near a desolate intersection of Highways 6 and 56. To call the roads highways was generous. One standing stop sign survived. The other had been knocked down. Didi had noticed that after leaving Johnny's, Lyle stayed on the interstate only until the next exit and then took the local roads. Was that in his plans? He seemed to know the roads quite well and never checked a map.
They parked in a small dusty lot in front of a place called Smokey's. Didi tried to stretch her achy body, but her big bag was in the way of her feet. She wanted to kick it out of the way, but there was nowhere to kick it to. Her sandal became tangled up in the strap of the bag, and Didi struggled to break free. It was ferociously hot. With the vents off, Didi had trouble breathing. She thought of again asking if she could roll down the window. She didn't think he'd mind, because there was no one in the parking lot.
Of course there was nothing to drink in the car. Though he had gone inside Johnny's to get some drinks, he had run out empty-handed. What Didi had drunk in Johnny's bathroom was on Lyle's shoesâa small solace. She was sweaty, thirsty, and the baby was tightening in her belly. Her tongue now felt like a fat, immobile slug in her mouth, and her breast hurt where he had grabbed her.
But when Lyle looked at her left hand again and told her to take off her engagement ring, all the thirst and pain vanished.
“No,” she said, pulling her left hand away across her body, away from him. Why couldn't she have belonged to another religion, one where they wore the wedding rings on their right hands instead of their left? She had heard the Greeks or somebody did that.
Not that it would have mattered to him. His thin, wiry body rubbing against her belly, he leaned across the bench seat and grabbed her hand.
Holding her left wrist painfully tight, Lyle said to her, “Didi, what are you doing? Don't you know me by now?”
She started crying. “Please don't take my ring. Please.”
“Oh, what's the matter, pretty Didi?” he cooed sarcastically. “Don't tell me you'd rather lose your life than your precious little ring.”
“Take my ring and let me go,” she sobbed. “That's a fair exchange. My ring for me. It's a one-and-a-half-carat stoneâa good one. It must be worth six thousand dollars. Take it and let me go.”
Still holding her wrist painfully hard, his breath assaulting her face, he said, “Six thousand dollars for your life. Now, now, my bologna. You don't value yourself very highly. Don't you think you're worth more than six grand?”
Trying to pull away from him, she repeated, “Take my ring and let me go.”
He said gently, “I'll tell you what. I'll take your ring and keep you with me. How would that be?”
“No,” she said. “No.”
“But Didi,” said Lyle, trying to pry the ring off her numb finger. “I have big plans for you. I can't let you go. That's like asking a lover to leave the love of his life. What kind of lover would I be? Did Othello let Desdemona go?”
Crying, she fought him. She pulled in her fingers toward her wrist and pushed him away with her right hand.
“Goddammit! What's gotten into you?” he yelled. He was in an awkward position. He couldn't get the ring off. They struggled. Pinning her against the seat with his body, he let go of her wrist for a moment and swiped her in the face with his forearm.
“Didi, you have a lot to lose here,” he said menacingly, panting. “Stop being stupid. I see that I'm going to have to teach you. Education doesn't come from books, you know. And you have no common sense, you crazy bitch.”
“Wait,” she said plainly. “Wait.”
Squeezing her hands together, Lyle reached over the bench seat into the back. After rooting around briefly, he pulled out a hunter's knife from under the seat.
“See this knife, Didi?”
Before Didi had time to think or speak, Lyle brought the knife down and sliced the fingers on her left hand, opening four of them right across the second knuckle.
Didi cried aloud and tried to pull her hand away, but Lyle was stronger. Blood dripped onto her yellow dress. Holding her bleeding fingers in one hand and the knife in the other, Lyle said, “This is just a warning. Now take off your ring, or I promise you, I will cut your finger off, and then the finger
and
the ring will be mine. Wouldn't you rather just give me the ring?”
Made temporarily breathless by the wound, Didi couldn't speak.
Lyle calmly said, “Take the ring off. Now.”
Didi said, “Let go, and I'll take it off.”
He let go, still holding the knife against her.
The weight gain during her pregnancy had made the ring a tight fit. In a few minutes, as the finger swelled from the knife wound, the fit would be even tighter. However, right now, the blood created a slick, slippery surface helping the diamond ring slide off her finger.
Lyle took the ring and then wiped the knife on the hem of Didi's summer dress, picking it up high enough to expose most of Didi's thigh. She wanted to pull the dress down, but didn't dare. In any case, she couldn't move at that moment even if she wanted to.
“Diamonds are forever,” Lyle said, smiling and kissing the ring. Then he saw there was blood on it, and he put the ring in his mouth and sucked on it, saying, “Mmmmmm.” He bent to her. “Your blood, Didi, it tastes so sweet,” he whispered.
She moved her head away in disgust. She heard him mutter, “Do you taste this sweet all over?”
Didi stared away from his face, mere inches away from hers. She wished she had something sharp and ragged in her hands at that moment.
God help me.
He moved away.
“Lessee if I get six thousand dollars for it,” Lyle said cheerfully. “Oh, and while I'm gone, could you clean yourself up?” he asked. “Wrap your hand in your dress and squeeze tightly. The dress is as good as ruined already, and you don't want to bleed to death in my car, do you?”
That is my idea of hell, Didi thought, as he leaned over her to reach inside the glove compartment. He pulled out the cell phone, chortling lightly, and left her in the car with all the windows shut.
Didi quickly rolled down the window to let in some air. She wasn't going to just sit there in hundred-degree weather as the car gained five degrees a minute.
She was alone in the car.
Didi looked around the parking lot, and then on the floor for the knife, but he had taken the knife along with the gun. Taken it with him when he went to sell her ring, the ring that Rich had bought her when they had no money. It had taken them five years to pay off that ring, and it was the only piece of jewelry she owned, because no other jewelry in the world could compare to her emerald-cut diamond. Often her girlfriends would advise Didi to put it in a safe deposit box so it wouldn't get stolen. One day she had mentioned the idea to Rich, who was opposed to it, saying that sure, if someone stole the ring, she wouldn't have it, but if she put it in a safe deposit box, she wouldn't have it either.
“Well, I'd have it,” she had argued. “I just wouldn't have it with me.”
“Same difference,” Rich said. “You can't see it, you can't look at it, you can't show it to anyone. With this ring I thee love,” said her husband. “What are you going to do? Every time you feel warmly toward me, you gonna run to the bank?”
That's what he had said, but now she was sitting here with slashed fingers and she didn't have her ring. The small parking lot glistened with heat. It looked as hot as she felt. But it was not an animate object. It could not feel pain. It didn't have another animate object inside itself.
She sat, her fried brain trying to figure Lyle out.
It was clear he didn't want money. He had taken her ring, but as an afterthought, as something malicious, not something essential. He wasn't concerned about money, that Didi was sure about.
Also, he didn't seem to want to kill her.
She hadn't served her purpose. But what would happen, after she had?
What did he want? Did he want to take her home to meet his parents and pretend she was his wife? He already had a wife. Did he want to take her to a bar and make his wife jealous? She leaned back against the seat and breathed heavily. Did he want to have sex with her? She felt bile come up into her throat.
With a pregnant woman?
Was that a fate worse than death? That lascivious way he'd touched her thigh as he cleaned the bloody knife, his lecherous laugh when he asked her for a kiss outside the gas station bathroom, these things cut her and ate at her, they gnawed at her flesh and emptied her heart of compassion for him. She closed her eyes.
That it may please You mercifully to pardon all his sins and make him stop, we beseech You to hear us, good Lord.
Didi wondered where Lyle was taking her. Where were they going? He could have driven to any deserted place in Dallas, raped her, killed her, driven off. He had mentioned a place before. Why would he need to drive her away from Dallas?
Didi wanted to believeâneeded to believeâhis plans for her didn't include extreme violence to her and her child. Sitting in his car, keeping her wounded fingers on her lap, Didi Wood needed to believe she would be safe. God wouldn't let her die. She opened her lips and mouthed her prayer as if it were a weapon against him.
Lord, be near me, Your faithful servant Didi, in my time of weakness and pain, sustain me by Your grace, that my strength and courage may not fail.
That's it, I'm not sitting here anymore. He'll have to shoot me in plain sight.
But she didn't want to be shot.
Didi got out of the car. Holding her bleeding hand gently with the other, she walked as quickly as she could to the road, never turning around to look at the pawnshop. I'm going to stand in the middle of the highway and wave till a car pulls over, she thought.
She took her position in the road.
They were west of West, Texas. They were nowhere and no one was around them. There was unfarmed flatland on Didi's left and a pasture on Didi's right. The pasture was ungrazed, too hot even for cows.
Didi stood.
One minute passed.
No cars came.
He's going to come and kill me,
thought Didi. Kill me, kill my baby, take my life and my ring, and never be seen again.
Didi could barely get her lips open to pray.
I don't want him to kill me. I have two little girls, God save them, back home, waiting for their mom, oh, God, I hope that Rich remembers that Amanda doesn't like her steak and French fries on the same plate, or there'll be a scandal.â¦
She turned around and slowly, sadly, walked back to the car, looking back at the empty road.
She didn't get in but stood leaning against the car, and soon the door of the pawnshop opened and Lyle walked out with a tall, heavyset man, who nodded silently to her.
Lyle ran to Didi, blocking the man's view of her. “Sit down, honey, sit down, you shouldn't be standing!” And when he got to her, he hissed in her ear, “Do you want him to die, Didi? Do you want me to kill him? Get in the fucking car.”