He waited for the guilt to hit him. This is the part where I run after him. Tell him I didn’t mean it. Seconds passed. Then minutes. Peter realized that the feeling swelling inside his chest was not guilt at all.
It was relief.
Switching off the downstairs lights, he tiptoed up to Lexi’s bedroom.
It’ll be just the two of us now, darling. You don’t need your brother. Daddy’ll take care of you.
He wouldn’t wake her. He’d just kneel next to the bed for a moment. Breathe in her sweet child’s smell. Take comfort from her warm, sleeping, innocent body.
He pushed the bedroom door open slowly. The room was pitch-dark. Picking his way toward the bed from memory, gingerly stepping past the toy box and over the discarded clothes, Peter knelt down next to the bed and reached out a loving arm.
A gust of wind in the face caught him by surprise.
He glanced up. The bedroom window was open.
Beneath it, in the dim glow of the moonlight, he stared at the empty bed.
Lexi was gone.
EIGHT
THE FIRST THING SHE WAS AWARE OF WAS DARKNESS.
Total darkness.
Not the darkness of her bedroom. The thick, cold, suffocating darkness of the grave.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out. Something had been stuffed into her mouth, a bitter-tasting cloth. She couldn’t breathe.
Where am I?
Panic began coiling its way around her heart like a snake. Was she dreaming? She sat up. Her head cracked painfully against something solid and metal.
A coffin? No! Oh God, please, no!
Daddy!
Again she screamed. Again the cloth choked her, stifling the sound in her throat. Slowly, consciously, she began to inhale through her nose.
Keep calm. You’re alive. Don’t panic.
Air filled her lungs. Relax.
Bedtime stories about her great-great-grandfather Jamie McGregor came flooding into her mind. Jamie had been brave and cunning and resourceful. He’d battled sharks and land mines, escaped shipwrecks and fought off assassins. No situation had been too hopeless for him to figure a way out of it.
She tried to think logically.
What happened? How did I get here?
It was no good. She couldn’t remember. Mrs. Grainger had put her to bed, and then…and then…darkness. The fear returned like a great crashing wave.
Help me!
Lexi shivered. She realized suddenly that she was freezing cold. She was still wearing the thin cotton nightie she’d gone to bed in. Beneath her back the hard metal floor felt like sheet ice.
Bump.
What was that?
The floor was moving. It vibrated steadily, then every twenty seconds or so, it threw her body upward, like a tossed pancake. Suddenly it dawned on her: A car. I’m in the trunk of a car. I’ve been kidnapped, and they’re taking me somewhere. To their hideout.
If it hadn’t been happening to her, it would probably have been exciting. Kidnapping was one of Lexi’s favorite games. But this was no game. This was real.
“Get out.”
The man wore a mask. Not a ski mask, like bank robbers wore in the movies. A rubber Halloween mask. It made him look like a corpse.
Too consumed with fear and cold to move, Lexi froze. Her eyes widened with terror.
Another voice. “Don’t just stand there, man, pick her up. Get her inside before someone shows up.”
The corpse reached into the trunk and grabbed hold of Lexi’s arms. On instinct, she fought him, kicking and scratching like a wildcat.
“Fuck!” The corpse clutched at his forearm. Her sharp nail had drawn blood. “Little bitch!”
Pulling back his arm, he punched her in the face so hard she blacked out.
Time passed.
She was in a room with no windows. A low-wattage lightbulb burned constantly. Days and nights became one. At first, the pain in her face where the corpse had punched her was unbearable. But gradually it began to subside.
There was a bed in one corner, an old-fashioned porcelain chamber pot and a battered cardboard box containing a few desultory books and toys. The walls were bare, the floor smooth, green linoleum. It felt more like an office than a room in a house. The toys and books were all designed for much younger children.
My kidnappers don’t know much about kids.
Fear gave way to boredom. There was nothing to do, nothing to break the monotony of the endless, lonely hours. At regular intervals, a masked man would enter, empty and replace the chamber pot and bring Lexi some food. Her captors never spoke to her, or answered when she spoke to them, but occasionally she heard their dim, muffled voices through the walls.
There were three of them. A leader with a deep voice and a strange, foreign accent, and two others-the corpse and a third man who wore a variety of animal masks, sometimes a pig, sometimes a dog or a snake. It was the third man, animal man, who really frightened her.
He was standing over her bed. He had the pig mask on.
“Make a sound and I’ll kill you.”
No you won’t. If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now. You need me alive.
Lexi opened her mouth to scream but it was too late. A huge, hot hand clamped over her mouth. He was on the bed, pushing her down. The weight of him squeezed the breath from her body. One hand still covered her mouth, but Lexi could feel the other clawing beneath her nightgown. NO! A sharp pain between her legs brought tears to her eyes. She tried to move, to struggle, but it was hopeless. She was pinned like a leaf beneath a boulder.
He made strange noises. Deep, guttural groans Lexi had never heard before. The hair on her scalp began to rise with terror. Then suddenly the weight lifted.
Voices.
“What are you doing in there, man?”
It was the leader.