Lie Still (41 page)

The phone rang, jangly and intrusive. I don’t remember crossing over to the receiver, but I found it in my hand.

“What is it, you son of a bitch?”

Silence.

“Emily, it’s me.”

Mike.

“Are you OK?”

“Why did you pick
him
to watch over me?” I demanded, a little too shrilly.

“He’s decent at what he does, Emily.”

Decent
.

“Did you just call to check on me? I’m perfectly fine.”

“Uh-huh, you
sound
fine. Yes, I called to check on you. I also wanted to let you know the FBI hit the jackpot in Peggy’s Salon in Hazard. The old girls napping under the hair dryers were only too happy to talk. Misty’s sister is the blond child in the photo. The girl who went missing, the one connected to Wyatt Deacon. She was eight when she disappeared. Dirt poor. Misty got out of there as soon as she graduated high school. Was accepted at Berea, changed her last name, and never looked back.”

“Berea?”

“A college in Kentucky that takes in promising kids, mostly from Appalachia, no tuition required. Transforms their lives.” Where Misty was reborn, I realized, into someone who could fool me.

“We learned something else. Do you remember that Dickie wired money across the country to Wyatt?”

“Yes.”

“In every one of those towns on Dickie’s list, two or three days after he wired the money, a little girl disappeared.”

I let this sink in, feeling sick.

I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

“What did you say the girl’s name was?”

“I don’t think I did. It’s Alice.”

Present tense. My decent, hopeful man.

Alice
.

The name scribbled on the back of a fortune, the sweet face held hostage in a frame at Misty’s. The girl at the birthday party with her killer’s arm draped around her shoulders.

I
woke to darkness, reassured to see Mike’s curled-up shape under the quilt next to me. The digital numbers on the clock reported that it was only 9:31.

I’d switched off the lamp at eight, as soon as my eyes blurred the words of last Sunday’s
Times
book section. Reading on Mike’s iPad always made me sleepy. It took about ten minutes before I shut it down, sunk into the pillow, and drifted off.

Mike must be as exhausted as I was to go to bed this early, probably more. And I had been so deeply asleep I hadn’t even heard him come in.

Misty’s face floated in my mind, a wisp of cotton candy. Her last name, Rich. Her childhood, poor beyond my imagining. I juggled myself over to face Mike, edging closer to spoon his back as closely as I could, the baby lodged between us. I didn’t want to wake up either of them.

As soon as my hand fell across his waist, I knew.

Mike’s body was built like a treacherous mountain, every muscle and crevice familiar to me.

This wasn’t Mike.

This guy, this stranger in my bed, was like a taut rubber band.

I forced down the scream in my throat.

Was I dreaming? Finally, really losing it?

This had to be one of those wild nightmares that pregnant women everywhere were so familiar with. A dream within a dream.

I slowly rolled myself away, heart trip-hammering, desperate not to disturb the lump beside me just in case, desperate to pinch myself awake. I could feel my fingers squeezing my skin.

Too late
.

In one swift movement, he grabbed my shoulders and shoved me down on my back. He slung himself on top of me. He bore his full weight painfully on my legs, assuring me that this was no dream.

For a second, I knew it was Pierce, who’d clawed his way out of hell. It was so strangely quiet as he hung over me. Just the squeak of the mattress as I flailed uselessly, a clumsy pregnant woman.

“Please.
Please
.” No response.

Then I screamed.

For Cody Hill, the obnoxious
rojo
who was supposed to be protecting me, for a neighbor, for anyone who could hear through the thick old walls of this house.

He was stuffing something thick and cottony in my mouth. A sock? I tried not to panic. To surrender, because breathing was important. I smelled lemons. Caroline was washed in something citrusy before she died. Or maybe after. Like it mattered at which point in the process she was washed. Or which particular killer was tying me up. My old stalker, or Caroline’s.

So dark in here, like I was resting on the bottom of the ocean.

Swim toward the light
.

Flick, flick, flick
.

I knew that sound. Fingernail against plastic.

I had heard the same sound in Gretchen’s office.

He leaned over, his chest tight against my belly. I slung myself up and grabbed for his eyes, snagging rough fabric.

A mask.

“Wyatt, why—?” My words were lost, suffocated.

He plunged the syringe into my arm.

M
y little girl is running. Down the hill. As fast as she can. Calling for me.

I am reaching out my hand to touch her; instead, I touch the chill, gritty floor.

A hammer is pounding in my brain. Chemical fumes stinging my nose. My legs feel like they are not attached to me. I am aware of the world but can’t see it. My consciousness is pushing slowly to the surface. I make out shapes.

Squares.

Boxes.

The man is busying himself in front of a vertical rectangle of gray light.

The sound of a sprinkler system spitting on and off.

Where am I? Not dead. Not raped
.

I don’t dare move, but I’m frantic to get a better view of my prison.

This couldn’t be.

The sunroom.

My
sunroom.

It wasn’t a sprinkler system. The monster was spray-painting the windows black, and he’d almost finished the job.

Before I could determine if my location was a good or bad omen for survival, something nudged my back.

The gag stifled my scream.

The monster worked at the window while the finger tickled my back, making circular motions.

Three of us.

Maybe this was his partner. Or vice versa—the man who plunged in the needle was behind me, and
his
partner was at the window. I steeled my body not to respond.

What if the thing behind me had a weapon? What if they were both just waiting for me to wake up to more fully enjoy themselves?

What if this rubbing thing on my back was a sexual prelude?

I fought down nausea, tried to calm my mind and remain perfectly still, watching the natural light and my hope disappear with each pass of the spray can. The finger continued to whirl away on my back.

Mike had been so careful for years, through every pregnancy, not to let me paint or change kitty litter, or touch any substance that could leach its way into my womb. And here I was, in an unventilated area with a sociopathic painter, and the fumes flooding my nose were the least of my worries.

Letters.

The finger was making letters.

Spelling something.

Rubbing it away with one pass of the hand, then starting over.

A game from elementary school days. I’d been good at this
when I was little, when Robin, my Barbie friend, and I would lie on her bed and write silly messages on each other’s backs. We graduated to the Helen Keller game, where we shut our eyes and signed into each other’s hands.

The finger drew again, more insistently, a nail digging into my back.

The first letter was
N
.

No,
M
.

The second letter,
i
, the finger painfully punctuating the dot. The third letter was a snake. Easy. And then I knew.
Misty
. She kept going. Spelling her name. Rubbing it out. Spelling it again.

“Shit.” The man threw the can across the room, where it clattered against the wall. Instantly, the hand on my back stilled.

He’d run out of paint while working on the last window, black only half of the way down. He stalked purposefully toward us, and I squeezed my eyes shut, my heart twitching in my throat like a dying bird. He shined the blinding beam of a flashlight in my face and nudged my leg roughly with his foot. I kept my body limp, dead. He thrust a swift kick at something behind me. A groan. Misty. I felt a rush of guilt for thanking God that he kicked her instead of my baby.

“You girls have a nice time,” he said. “I’ve got a few things to do.”

That voice. It was the same, but different.

The sunroom door slammed and the deadbolt shot into place, the extra-sturdy kind I’d wanted to make sure nothing could get out.

M
isty, not moving.

My eyes, heavy, unable to stay open.

It didn’t seem like this was the memory that should be bearing down on me. But there it was, running a loop in my brain.
Four years after the rape, in a security line at the airport. Two men. Pierce’s roommate, Haywood. And a thinner, older version. His father.

I stared. The older man nodded politely. His son stood two feet from me and pretended I did not exist, even though he’d heard me that night. He’d
heard
me.

I’d heard him, too. I’d heard his feet hit the floor when he slid off the top bunk. Saw the streak of light when he opened the door, and black when he quietly shut it. That was the moment I stopped fighting Pierce.

That was the moment I gave up.

S
till curled on my side. A sharp pain shooting down my back. Eyes open, legs like lead. Unsure what was real. The man with the needle. The man at the window. If Misty was lying behind me. Any of it, none of it.

The room spun. I closed my eyes, the boxes and blackened windows imprinted on my eyelids like a sick light show.

The sunroom door burst open, all those little panes of glass shaking and trembling. I opened my eyes.

He wore a black Nike T-shirt and black shorts. His legs were long, and lean. A runner’s. I imagined them pumping up and down Appalachian hills. He was freakishly strong, wiry muscle formed by hard labor, not sculpted at a twenty-four-hour gym. Why hadn’t I seen this before?

His mask was gone.

So were the scruff and the limp.

He didn’t care anymore if I knew.

He wasn’t the son.

He was the father.

R
ichard Deacon stared at me clinically, like I was a butterfly he wasn’t sure was pretty enough to put under glass. The small camping lantern he set on a box cast hideous shadows on the walls.

He knelt and rested his hand on my stomach, gently.

My breath snagged.

“Caroline got pregnant again.” His hand began to rub a circle. “I bet she didn’t tell you that. On the way out the door, she threw it in my face. That she’d killed my child. She aborted
my
child in
my
town.”

He bent over me, and whispered to Misty. I couldn’t hear what he said, but her whimper sliced me like a knife. His arm was inches from my face, while his hand was busy with Misty behind me. I could smell the dank sweat of his armpit. See the black hair growing over a purple bruise near his wrist. Maybe Misty had fought back.