Yet when she threw open the door, Charlie’s face—his dear face that could seem so serious, then lift suddenly in a smile of such brilliance it took your breath away—was haggard with worry. He wasn’t alone either. Bronwyn hovered behind him, looking as distraught as she did bedraggled.
Charlie flicked a glance at the shoes in her hand. ‘You’d better put those on and come with us, Mary. Noelle’s missing. We think Robert has taken her.’
Mary had a very real sense just then of something rushing toward her, as real as if she’d been standing in the middle of a dark road with headlights bearing down on her.
The blood drained from her face, and she felt as if she might faint. Charlie must have seen it because he stepped up at once to slip an arm about her waist. It occurred to her in some distant, detached part of her brain that he was holding her the exact same way that
she
held her mother when assisting Doris up the stairs. In the muted yellow glow of the porch light, a moth fluttered close to his head. She watched it brush against a curly charcoal tendril before reeling back into the darkness.
‘No,’ she said quite calmly. ‘It must be a mistake. Noelle’s asleep upstairs.’
But Charlie’s face told a different story. ‘Mary,
think.
Think where he might have taken her.’
Bronwyn stepped around her father and into the light. ‘We drove out to the Methodist church. A
…
friend tipped me off that Robert was up to something. We thought we could catch his guys in the act.’ Bits of leaf and twigs were snared in her long black hair, and bloody scratches stood out on her arms, in which a video camera was cradled as tenderly as a newborn infant. Though a bit muddy, it looked none the worse for the wear. ‘It’s all here,’ she said, tapping the camera. ‘I hid in the bushes and got most of it on tape. Not his face—it was too dark—but what he was saying.’
She flipped open the instant replay screen and pushed down on the play button. Darkness, then a blurry shape swam into view, followed by more fractured images as if the camera were being jostled. Sounds, too. The thrashing of leaves, the distant murmur of voices, the rush of panicked breathing. Then something heavy toppling to the ground, followed by a voice that caused her arms to tighten with gooseflesh.
‘Happy anniversary, darling.’
Mary drew away from Charlie to sink down on the staircase. ‘We were right all along. It wasn’t just our imaginations or some wild-goose chase. He—oh, God.’
She clapped a hand over her mouth, then just as abruptly as she’d sat down shot back to her feet. Her gaze locked on Charlie, standing before her with an arm about his daughter’s shoulders like a man bearing up under a tremendous weight.
‘You’ve been to his house, I assume.’ She was surprised by how calm she sounded.
‘We just came from there. Not a soul in sight. His folks don’t know where he is either. I think they’re telling the truth, they looked pretty damn shook up,’ Charlie reported grimly.
‘What about Emma?’
‘She’s fine. She’s with them.’
‘Do they have any idea where he might have taken Noelle?’
Charlie shook his head.
‘Dante
…
uh, my friend … is checking around,’ Bronwyn volunteered. ‘He’s talking to some guys who work for the—for Robert.’
Mary was slipping her shoes on when it hit her. ‘Wait. There
is
someone. It’s a long shot, but he might be able to help.’ She dashed upstairs and was thumbing through the directory for Hank’s number when something else occurred to her. ‘What about the sheriff’s office?’ she called down. ‘I don’t suppose it would do any good to call them.’
Charlie shook his head. ‘I did one better, got my security guard, Tim Washburn, to phone his buddies at state trooper headquarters in Albany. They’re on their way.’
Mary dialed Hank’s number, and a foggy voice at the other end answered with the weary resignation of someone used to being awakened in the middle of the night, ‘’Lo?’
‘Hank, it’s Mary Quinn,’ she spoke urgently into the receiver. ‘Something’s happened to Noelle. We think’—she hesitated, because the concept still felt so utterly preposterous, like something out of a B grade movie—‘her husband’s kidnapped her.’
There was a beat of silence. Then Hank replied hoarsely, ‘Jesus, oh, shit. Let me throw some clothes on. I’ll be right over.’
‘Can you think of anyplace he might have taken her?’ she asked. ‘Somewhere Noelle might have mentioned?’
‘Hold on. Let me think …’ A rustling noise at the other end, as if he were throwing something on even as they spoke. She heard a heavy sound, like a shoe dropping to the floor. Hank was breathing hard. ‘Wait. Yes. Last week we were out for a drive and passed the site for Cranberry Mall. It struck me at the time …’ He paused as if whatever he was thinking might be too farfetched.
‘What?
Mary urged. ‘Hank, even if it’s a wild-goose chase, tell me.’
‘Oh, Christ … I can’t believe I’m even thinking this, it’s so macabre, but I remember thinking that if someone wanted to bury a—something they didn’t want found, that would be the perfect place.’
Mary was swamped by a terror so great that for an instant she couldn’t catch her breath. Then she managed to say, ‘We’ll meet you there. And Hank? If you own a gun, better bring it along.’
Noelle’s face and scalp stung from the dirt that rained down like shrapnel. A cloud of gritty dust enveloped her. Sprawled at the bottom of the pit, buried to her chest in a mound of loose earth and gravel, she coughed and spat, bringing up a mouthful of vile-tasting phlegm. She was getting that wobbly feeling in her head again of something loosely nailed down starting to slide out from under her.
Don’t you dare faint!
a voice screamed.
You’ll never wake up.
Clinging to consciousness, she shook herself free and crawled to the farthest corner of the pit, careful to maintain as much distance as possible from the bundled tarp with its gruesome contents. She struggled to her feet, peering up just in time to see the Cat’s huge saw-toothed bucket poised overhead like the mouth of some ravenous mythical beast. Noelle cringed, expecting more dirt to come raining down, then saw that it was receding. She could hear the low whine of its hydraulic boom, the hollow scrape of another load being scooped up.
Oh, sweet Jesus, he’s going to bury me alive …
Insane laughter clawed up her throat.
Noelle gave herself a hard mental slap.
Stop it. Stop thinking that way. You can’t afford it.
She was afraid to die, yes, but even more afraid of what would happen to Emma.
She looked frantically about. But there was no escape. She was trapped. Within minutes she’d be suffocating under tons of dirt. No sooner had the thought entered her mind than a second torrent was unleashed on her. With a shriek Noelle dropped to her haunches, bringing her arms over her head in a futile attempt to shield herself. Fist-size clods broke against her back and head. Bright splinters of light flashed behind her tightly closed eyes.
He’s won,
she thought.
He managed to beat me after all
Even if she could climb out, he’d track her down and kill her. She began to weep with exhaustion and despair.
A memory from last summer flashed through her mind: taking her daughter for Red Cross swimming lessons. Poor Emma couldn’t seem to stay afloat. Each time she flipped over onto her back, she’d start to panic. Even with the instructor, a nice, wholesome-looking girl named Stacey, holding a hand lightly pressed to the small of her back while coaxing encouragingly, ‘Relax. That’s the trick. Just take a deep breath and let yourself go,’ Emma had remained stiff as a board. Afterward, swaddled in a towel, she’d sat shivering on Noelle’s lap, sobbing, ‘M-m-mommy, I tried my very, very hardest, b-b-but it wasn’t good enough!’
Now it was Noelle who spoke those words inside her head.
Emma, baby, I’m trying my very hardest, but sometimes even mommies can’t stay afloat. It’s not because I don’t love you. No matter what happens, you’ve always got to remember that: that I loved you more than life itself …
Dust swirled up around her, and she broke into a fit of coughing that made her retch. The mound at the bottom of the pit had doubled while above her the Cat’s engine continued to rumble, a noise broken only by the ratcheting whine of its hoist.
Quite clearly she thought,
I don’t want to die. Not like this.
If she’d been drowning, it wouldn’t be so terrible. There was a kind of poetry in drowning, wasn’t there? Like Ophelia. But to die like this, buried beneath a—a
shopping mall.
With an eternity of tired, swollen feel clopping overhead, giggling teenagers wearing too much makeup, mothers at the end of their rope tugging the arms of truculent children who whined,
‘But, Mommy, you
promised—’
It was unthinkable. Worse,
ignoble
somehow.
The grinding overhead grew louder as it drew close to rain yet another heap of indignity on her. She pressed herself flat against the side of the pit. But there was no safe place, not really.
Think,
a voice coaxed,
think
…
What came to her mind then was Aesop’s fable about the clever monkey that tricks the crocodile into carrying him across the river. She didn’t know what made her think of it until she looked up and saw the underside of the Cat’s inexorably lowering bucket, starkly outlined against the sky, a pale moon perched on its lip.
Nimble as the monkey in the fable, she scrambled to the top of the mound. It afforded her only a slight advantage, four or five feet at best, but maybe it was enough. As the bucket tipped and a fresh torrent began to rain down, she fought the urge to duck. Instead, she stretched up, reaching as high as she could, flinching only when a rock struck a stinging blow to her forehead. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she strained upward, holding her breath for what seemed an eternity until the bucket completed its groaning arc.
At the precise moment it had reached its lowest point, Noelle gave a little leap and grasped hold of the bucket’s gritty, toothed lip. Her filthy hands slipped, and she nearly lost her grip. Then the boom began its jerky ascent and the bucket’s angle shifted a crucial fraction of an inch.
Quick,
her mind shrieked,
before he sees you.
With a superhuman effort she heaved herself over the lip and into the bucket, which was as wide and deep as a bathtub—just enough for her to remain hidden from Robert’s view.
Then she was airborne, rocking upward as if on a Ferris wheel, hunched low with one eye cocked on the great star-strewn bowl of sky overhead. She could feel the blood trickling from her forehead into her eye, but she ignored it. Later there would be time to attend to such things. Right now she had to concentrate merely on staying alive.
Moments later the boom began to descend. She could feel the bucket vibrate beneath her, hear the grinding of the Cat gears. Suddenly she was pitched onto the mound alongside the pit, half tumbling, half scuttling her way down its loose, slippery slope.
Noelle rolled to a stop on the hard ground, where she held herself as flat and still as possible. She hardly dared to breathe. Had he spotted her?
Please, oh, please, no.
Seconds ticked by, excruciating, interminable, while she listened to the harsh scrape of the bucket scooping up more earth little more than an arm’s length away. Out of the corner of one eye she could see the treads on the Cat’s huge belt tracks, a single groove of which was wide enough to have easily accommodated one of Emma’s hands. Then, blessedly, the bucket swung up and out of sight.
She waited a beat longer until she was certain she was no longer in Robert’s direct line of sight, before scrambling to her feet and breaking into a run. She didn’t dare risk so much as a glance over her shoulder. Her eyes remained fixed on the acre or so of bare lunar expanse separating her from the road and dark line of trees just beyond.
A line she’d picked up from somewhere dropped like a nickel into its slot:
Feets, don’t fail me now.
Some deeper consciousness must have been listening, because suddenly she was running faster than she ever had in her life, skimming over the ground as effortlessly as a leaf driven by a cruel autumn wind, scarcely registering the pain as a foot unaccustomed to being bare came down hard on a rock or sharp stick. She darted around a severed tree trunk jutting from the earth like a half-pulled tooth, then past a cement truck angled beside the freshly dug foundation of the mall’s main concourse.
The road loomed ahead like a fabled city of yore.
She was gaining on it when the Cat’s distant groan all at once seemed to grow louder. A surge of terror caused her to stumble and nearly fall. As she chased her shadow, bumping and swaying over the stark, moonlit earth like a creature even more terrified than she, Noelle could almost taste her fear, a taste very much like blood.
She tossed a panicked glance over her shoulder. The Cat, which resembled a huge mythical beast in the moonlight, wasn’t more than a hundred yards behind her. She caught the wink of LCD gauges on its dash and, high up in the cab, a shadowy figure perched like a wrathful king on his throne.
I tricked him, and he’s not happy about it.
Amid the roar of her terror, and the blood running in warm trickles down her cheek, the thought brought a cold smile of triumph to her lips.
Other than the moonlight stippling it in tiger stripes of shadow, the road to the site was dark as Charlie raced down it in his mile-weary Blazer. Mary rode shotgun, and Bronwyn sat in the rear, clinging to the seat in front of her as if to the pommel of a runaway horse. Gravel rattled in the undercarriage as they juddered over potholes, narrowly missing a raccoon that trundled across their path like a portly traveler hurrying to make a train.
Mary could see the chain-link gates up ahead—wide open, as if she and Charlie and Bronwyn weren’t the first to arrive -and a trailer just beyond. Yet at first glance, in the narrow beam of the headlights, the site looked deserted.