Girl, Stolen (5 page)

She didn’t know what she was searching for, and she didn’t know that she would know even if she found it. Cheyenne needed something. Something that would tip the balance. She knew it was too much to hope for a pocketknife, a telephone, a pair of scissors. But even a pen would be good. She might be able to hide a pen and use it later to stab someone. The room was surprisingly neat and empty. Even though they didn’t seem like the kind of people who would have a guest room, maybe that’s what this was.

The only useful item Cheyenne found was on top of the desk. She ran into it with her nose and nearly tipped it on its side. The glass! She hooked it with her chin and pulled it back to the edge of the desk. Then she turned around and grabbed it with the fingers of her bound hands.

Whole it was nothing. But broken? She pinched the top edge between the thumb and fingers of her right hand. Without giving herself time to think, she swung her hand in a short, sharp arc that ended when the glass hit the edge of the dresser.

W
alking back to the barn, Griffin thought that he had never had a girl in his room before, let alone on his bed.

And it was weird to be able to look right at someone and know that they had no idea that you were looking at them. And you could stare as long as you wanted without ever worrying about being caught. Although if Cheyenne hadn’t told him she was blind, Griffin might not have known. When he spoke, she seemed to look right at him. Maybe her right eye wandered a bit, that was all. She had beautiful eyes, so dark they looked all pupil.

It was easier to think about her being blind than it was about what to do now. Griffin wished life was like one of the computers at his old school, that he could just make a few clicks and restore things to the way they had been five minutes before he spotted the keys dangling from the Escalade’s ignition. Instead, he had made one impulsive decision after another, and now he was stuck with the results.

Griffin lit the cigarette Cheyenne had made him take out of his mouth earlier. He could hear the radio playing from inside the barn. The sound floated on the crisp air. For some reason, TJ and Jimbo liked to listen to this right-wing radio talk-show host, some guy who was constantly going off about illegals and health care and homos. Griffin thought it was kind of funny how they were always agreeing with him, saying “damn straight!” when the radio host would probably have happily strung up the two of them himself.

Iced-over puddles cracked under his feet. It hadn’t snowed yet, but it felt like it might. Griffin liked how the snow shook a white blanket over everything, softening all the edges. Take the remains of one car – a Honda that had been relieved of its wheels, door panels, seats, and stereo – sitting midway between the house and the barn. Covered in snow, it would become a beautiful, abstract sculpture.

His dad had driven the Escalade into the barn and was now walking around it, eyeing it up and down. The SUV was cherry. It had less than fifteen thousand miles on it. Stealing it should have been a real coup. It would have shown his dad that Griffin was capable of playing in the big leagues – if Cheyenne hadn’t been in the back. But that was a pretty big
if
.

“Are you going to replace the VINs?” Griffin asked Roy. A VIN – vehicle identification number – was stamped in several places on all cars. Basically, it was a car’s fingerprint. But you could take the VIN from a salvaged car and put it onto a stolen car, in essence swapping the fingerprint of a wanted car for a legal one.

Roy ran his thumb over his lip. “I don’t know. It’s probably too hot to risk it. I’m thinking maybe we should just slap some new plates on it for a bit and have you ditch it up in Washington, like the forest or something. You could throw that old moped in the back, and then when you got there put the old plates back on and wipe the whole thing down and use the moped to get back. Leave it someplace it won’t get found until next spring.”

“We could get fifteen grand for it, easy,” Griffin protested.

“We could get fifteen
years
for it, easy.” There was an edge to Roy’s voice. “In Oregon, there’s minimum sentences for kidnapping and no plea-bargaining. If anyone finds out we’re involved, we’ll be in deep for sure.” The anger returned, as Griffin had known it would. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re going to do with her?”

They had been living on the wrong side of the law for a long time, but it had always been property crimes. Folks who lived around here maybe knew that Roy ran an odd little body shop. But they weren’t the kind to ask questions about why it didn’t advertise in the yellow pages, didn’t have a sign out front, and didn’t accept customers off the street.

“Look, she can’t even see us,” Griffin said. “So she can’t say what we look like. She doesn’t know our names. She has no idea where we are. We can keep the car and trade plates and VINs. And tonight I’ll drive her out to the middle of nowhere and make her get out. By the time anybody finds her, I’ll be long gone.”

But Roy had stopped paying attention to Griffin. He was holding up one hand, his eyes narrowed down to slits as he listened to the radio.

The announcer was saying, “Coming up in the noon news – police are investigating the daring kidnapping of the sixteen-year-old daughter of Nike’s president. She was taken at ten this morning from the Woodlands Experience shopping center.”

Nike’s president?
Griffin thought. Nike had started out as a running shoe company but now made clothes and shoes for every kind of sport or for people who just liked the look of their clothes.

Roy turned up the radio. In silence, the two of them listened to two commercials, one for a law firm, the other for Burgerville.

The female announcer came back. She said breathlessly, “Police say sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, daughter of Nike’s president, Nick Wilder, was kidnapped shortly after ten this morning at the Woodlands Experience shopping center. Her father spoke to reporters a few minutes ago.”

A man’s voice, strained but professional sounding, said, “My daughter is blind. We lost her mother three years ago in the same accident that took Cheyenne’s sight. And Cheyenne’s also very ill. In fact, she was returning from the doctor’s office when she was kidnapped. If she doesn’t receive treatment immediately, she could die.”

The announcer cut in. “Police say Cheyenne and her stepmother stopped at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. The stepmother, Danielle Wilder, went in alone to get it, and that’s when the girl was taken. She is described as five foot two, one hundred five pounds, with brown eyes and long, dark, curly hair. She was last seen wearing a black tracksuit and a silver down coat. The car is a dark green Cadillac Escalade SUV, license number 396CVS. While there are reports of the car being driven at a high rate of speed out of the parking lot, witnesses were unable to give a good description of the person driving the car. An AMBER Alert has been issued. If you spot the vehicle, police ask that you call 9-1-1.” The announcer took a breath. “In other news…” Roy turned down the radio.

Griffin braced himself for the outburst he knew would come. The car was not just hot, it was on fire. And the girl was more a problem than ever.

But Roy just looked thoughtful. He turned, spit a stream of tobacco juice, and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand.

“President of Nike, huh?” Roy looked toward the house. “We need to think about this a little more. This might change things.”

T
he glass bounced off the edge of the dresser. It quivered in Cheyenne’s fingers but didn’t break. With her hands tied, it was hard to put much strength behind what was basically just a flick of her wrist. And a little part of her was afraid of cutting herself.

Cheyenne steeled herself and swung harder.

With a ringing sound, the glass bounced off again, unscathed.

She reminded herself that she had more to fear than getting cut. What these men might do to her was much, much worse. When next Cheyenne swung the glass, she pivoted with her hips and twisted her wrist as hard as she could.

Time seemed to slow down. She felt the impact and then the cracks radiating out as the glass split and broke. Cheyenne was left holding one large piece while several others pinged off the floor. Gingerly, she strained with the fingers of her free hand to explore the piece she still held. It was about two inches long and an inch wide. The edges were curved and very sharp. Even touching them lightly, she was afraid. It was like running her fingertip along a knife’s edge, full of dangerous promise. Her heart was beating in her ears.

What should she do first? The cord that tied her to the bed would be easier to cut, but she would still have her hands bound behind her. Cheyenne decided to concentrate on cutting the shoestring around her wrists.

She gritted her teeth and twisted her hand until the edge of the glass rested on the shoelace. The position was almost impossible to maintain. The tension ran all the way up to her shoulder blades. Then she realized she needed to turn her hand even farther, or she would risk slicing her left wrist as well as the shoestring. She gritted her teeth, twisted her wrist, and began to saw.

In her mind’s eye, the shoestring was white. She had never asked anyone what color her shoestrings were, but white was the only color that made sense. Cheyenne knew that her shoes were light blue and that – before the accident at least – shoelaces had pretty much come in white, brown, or black. So it was probably white, and that was how she pictured it. Cheyenne still “saw” things, even things she had never laid eyes on before the accident. And it was more than just the little blurry slice of vision she had left. She didn’t know what it was like for those who had been born blind, but for her, imagining that she could still see, as if she had simply closed her eyes and could open them to view the world at any time, helped her to create mental maps of rooms and buildings and even neighborhoods. And the maps made it easier for her to move around, whether it was in her room at home (where she really had seen most things before she lost her sight), or at her school or through downtown Portland (both places where her mental maps had to be built from a combination of imagination and memory).

So in Cheyenne’s mind, the shoelace was white, the bedpost she was tied to was painted brown, and the soft quilt on the bed was made up of alternating squares of white and pale yellow. And even if she twisted her head and concentrated, her sliver of vision might not be clear enough to confirm any of this.

The doctors said it was good practice to hold on to her visual memory and to exercise her skills as long as she could. Because she had been born sighted, Cheyenne still related to the world the way a sighted person would. When she dreamed, she still saw colors and faces, furniture and flowers, and was shocked when she woke up and realized she couldn’t see any of those things. And deep inside herself, Cheyenne cherished the hope that someday she would see again. Every few months, her dad would read her some story in the paper about experiments with computers or implants. Danielle didn’t like that he read these stories to Cheyenne. She talked about raising false hope. But Cheyenne had long ago decided that she would rather have false hope than no hope at all.

Sure, Cheyenne had learned how to “travel” with a cane – which was what the professional blind people called it. She had learned to use a computer that spoke to her. She had learned how to organize her clothes so they weren’t inside out or clashing. She could cook, eat, put on makeup, do her nails, fix her hair. But it still couldn’t take away the times when she said something about a person she thought wasn’t in the room – only they were. Or the cashiers who saw Cheyenne put the clothes on the counter and open her wallet and still said to her friends Kenzie or Sadie, “Will she be paying by check or credit card?” As if she wasn’t capable of speech.

The room was cold, but Cheyenne’s hands were sweating, making it hard to keep a good hold on the broken piece of glass. The tendons in her wrist ached. She ignored everything but the thought that soon she would have her hands free.