Thorne's Wife

by Joan Hohl

  “Why, Jonas,” Val said in a teasing tone, “I do believe you’re turning into a romantic.”

  “And if I don’t soon get home to you,” he returned in a soft growl, “I’m afraid I’ll be turning into a raving sex-starved maniac.”

  * * *

  Her flagging spirits bolstered both by Jonas’s fervently expressed need for her and the expectation that he would be home in a week or so, Val cruised through her work on Thursday.

  But her spirits plunged at the sound of rage in his voice when he called early that evening.

  “It’s hit the fan,” Jonas snarled in tones of fury and outrage. “The scandal’s been revived, and my name and photograph are plastered all over every newspaper and yellow journalism rag in Europe.”

  “But…how?” Val was stunned. “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you how,” he snapped. “Some overeager news hound became curious about my visits to the hospital. He did some digging, added one and one, and managed to come up with four.”

  Val shivered at the sound of his voice. Jonas in a cold rage was not a pretty sight. And Jonas was definitely in a cold rage; Val could almost feel the chill emanating from the telephone wire. “Four?” she repeated blankly. “Jonas, please calm down and explain. I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple enough,” Jonas said. “The news hound sniffed along the trail Lynn has left littered with discarded lovers and ex-husbands over the years until he discovered the very first of the bunch…yours truly. He then apparently did his homework on me and decided I was news.”

  Val winced. She knew how much Jonas disliked personal publicity. He painstakingly worked at keeping a low profile. She knew also that he absolutely detested notoriety. Furthermore, she was very much afraid she knew the answer to her next question, but asked it just the same. “And the four you mentioned. Where does that come in?”

  His low laughter had the sound of a feral growl. “Just where you’d suspect. The newspaper stories are loaded with speculation that instead of a triangle here, there might be the possibility of a quadrangle.”

  “But that’s not true!” Val cried indignantly.

  “Calm down, sweetheart,” Jonas murmured. “It probably won’t amount to more than a three-day wonder. I just wanted to warn you in case it hit the gossip columns in the States.”

  Had Val been able to look dispassionately at the situation, she might have concluded that it was almost funny. The conversation had begun with her attempt to calm him down, and ended with him soothing her. But Val was beyond viewing the debacle objectively. Upset and worried about him, she revealed the depth of her emotion when she wished him good-night.

  “Please remember that I love you, Jonas,” she whispered fiercely.

  “I remember,” he said, repeating his now habitual response. “Remembering that is what’s keeping me going.”

  * * *

  Val’s spirits were dragging on the floor behind her when she left the office Friday morning to keep her appointment with her obstetrician. After a thorough examination, Milt Abramowitz offered his opinion that Val was, as she’d suspected, into her sixth week of pregnancy. To confirm his opinion, he had his nurse draw a blood sample for a pregnancy test.

  Val spent the intervening hours in a fever of anxiety. When the doctor called later in the afternoon to inform her that the test results were positive, her lagging spirits took flight.

  During the hours that followed the call from the doctor, Val became a dedicated clock-watcher. She couldn’t wait to tell Jonas that within a few months of becoming a grandfather, he would become a father again.

  It was only as the time drew nearer to his expected call that Val began to have second thoughts, admittedly selfish ones, about telling him over the phone. By telling him now, she’d be denying herself the thrill of seeing his expression, and of being swept into his arms and crushed to his chest in his exuberance. Besides, it was an event they should share, Val thought dreamily, when they could witness the joy shining in each other’s eyes. It was not a moment to be squandered on a long-distance telephone call.

  She would wait, Val decided, and hug the news secretly to her until Jonas came home. She almost dreaded his call, afraid her excitement might overrule her decision, so that she’d find herself blurting out the announcement to him.

  The time for his call came, and passed. Another hour crawled by. Then another. As on the day he’d left, Val paced their bedroom, silently ordering the phone to ring. Where was Jonas? she asked herself countless times. Why didn’t he call? Was he ill? Had an unexpected crisis arisen, a setback to Lynn’s recovery?

  Through the night and into the dawn, Val was plagued by fears, doubts and dozens of questions. She had no answers. She was exhausted but couldn’t rest. Something was wrong, she knew. Something had to be wrong or Jonas would call.

  The phone rang just after six-thirty. Pouncing on the instrument, Val snatched up the receiver. Her voice was expelled from her throat on a gasping sigh.

  “Jonas?”

  “No, ma chère.”

  “Jean-Paul?” Panic dug its claws into Val’s chest. “Jean-Paul, why are you calling? Where is Jonas?” she demanded, inwardly fighting a need to shout.

  A tired sigh whispered through the connecting wires, then Jean-Paul said softly, urgently, “Valerie, you must now be brave.”

  “Brave?” Val whispered around the fear gathering in her throat. “Why must I be brave? Jean-Paul!” Now she did shout. “Where is Jonas?”

  “I wanted…had to call you before…” His voice cracked, then he went on in a strangled tone, “You’ll soon be receiving official notification, but I felt I had to—”

  The words “official notification” wrenched a scream from Val’s heart. “Where is Jonas?”

  “He’s been kidnapped.”

  Kidnapped? Kidnapped! Val’s mind whirled. Her thoughts spun crazily. Kidnapped? No. It was ludicrous! Jonas? Ridiculous. It was a mistake. That was it! Someone had made a dreadful mistake. Jonas had not been kidnapped. Prominent men got kidnapped. Distinguished men, recognizable because their names and photographs were frequently seen in the newspa— Val’s thoughts ground to a sudden stop. Names and photographs. Newspapers. Jonas.

  “…Valerie, Valerie, are you there? Do you hear me? Valerie, answer me!”

  Jean-Paul’s loud imploring voice crashed through the stunned horror gripping Val’s mind. “Jean-Paul, when did this happen?” she cried. “How did this happen?”

  “He was…taken as he was leaving the hospital this morning. Witnesses said that three men grabbed him and flung him into a waiting car. The car…got away.”

  “Taken?” she repeated in a voice that was barely there. “Grabbed? Flung?”

  “Valerie, I swear to you that every effort possible is being made to apprehend the kidnappers,” Jean-Paul said reassuringly. “Not an avenue will be overlooked in the effort to get Jonas back safely.”

  Val was beyond being reassured; she was in a state of abject terror. After Jean-Paul said he must hang up, she replaced the receiver, then sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the phone to ring again, dreading the sound.

  Official notification duly came, along with more words of assurance. Val heard and responded to the disembodied voice, while inside her head she screamed his name in agony.

  Jonas.

  When the initial shock wore off, Val took herself to task. Falling apart would not help Jonas, she told herself. He would be found and returned to her, she assured herself. Val determined that when Jonas was returned, it would not be to find either his wife or his business in a shambles.

  Val asked questions of the authorities. She received evasive answers until Jean-Paul and the others came home a week later. It was some time before Val had an opportunity to talk to Jean-Paul in private. Mary Beth was a frightened wreck; Lynn had had a relapse; Marge had aged ten years.

  “I want to know everything that you know,” Val said to Jean-Paul when they were finally alone. “The authorities can�
�t or won’t tell me anything.”

  Faced with her defiantly lifted chin, Jean-Paul sighed. “All I’ve been able to garner from friends is that the authorities suspect the kidnappers were from Central America and that they fear he has been taken there.”

  Central America. Val fought a new, insidious fear. There was so much turmoil in some of the Central American countries. She had read accounts of terrible atrocities….

  With sheer willpower, Val controlled her rioting imagination. She absolutely refused to fall apart. But Val did falter a little. “What do they want?” she cried. “They can have anything. They can have everything! If they’ll only let Jonas go, set him free.”

  “As far as I know, no demands have yet been made,” Jean-Paul said. He hesitated, then added with a Gallic shrug, “Valerie, I fear you must prepare yourself.”

  Val’s heart thumped. “What do you mean?” she asked in a dry croak. “Prepare myself for what?”

  Jean-Paul gripped her by her shoulders to support her trembling body. “I’m afraid, ma petite, that when demands are made, they will be political in nature, not financial.” He paused again, as if gathering fortitude before continuing. “Valerie, you know the prevailing sentiment in this country about granting concessions of that sort.”

  Val broke then. Sobbing, she collapsed against Jean-Paul. Cradling her in his arms in much the same way he had during his brother’s funeral five years before, he let her cry until the wracking sobs dwindled. Stroking her hair, he comforted her.

  “We must be strong, you and I, ma mignonne.” He smiled when she raised her tear-drenched eyes to his. “We must be strong for Jonas, and for his family, because we love him.” Jean-Paul’s eyes were suspiciously bright. “And because he would wish us to be strong and responsible.”

  Recalling her own assessment of Jonas’s sense of responsibility the morning he had left for France, Val nodded her head. “Yes,” she agreed softly. “Jonas would want that.”

  * * *

  Gaunt and silent, and to all appearances docile and resigned, Jonas stood in the midst of his captors. Head hanging in apparent exhaustion, his expression blank, he listened to the agitated discussion between the five kidnappers, straining to catch a word he understood in the rapid-fire Spanish.

  Jonas was in fact exhausted. He was also hungry, thirsty and filthy. But, though his attitude of weary acceptance didn’t reveal it, more than anything else Jonas was furious.

  The anger had begun simmering inside him soon after he regained consciousness. Initially he’d felt confused. He was in a plane, a rather decrepit prop plane. And he was securely bound at the wrists and ankles. A throbbing pain at the back of his head triggered Jonas’s memory.

  Jonas recalled the sharp suspicion he’d felt when four men had casually encircled him as he was leaving the hospital. Then, when he’d tried to step between two of them, his arms had been grasped on either side. Jonas remembered demanding an explanation an instant before a brutal blow to his head knocked him out cold.

  Ignoring the thumping ache resulting from the blow, Jonas glanced around the shabby interior of the flying rattletrap. He was alone in the compartment. He had remained alone until a few minutes prior to landing.

  At first, asking questions and demanding to know where he was being taken, Jonas had resisted being removed from the plane. All his efforts gained him were more brutal blows to the body and the verbal abuse of an angry spate of Spanish curses.

  Jonas had not reached the pinnacle of success by being stupid. Deciding to bide his time and save wear and tear on his hide, at least until he could figure out where he was, he gave every appearance of being cowed. But inside him, simmering anger had grown into cold rage.

  By Jonas’s reckoning, he had now been in captivity nearly six full weeks. He had attempted to escape twice. He had been beaten and starved for his trouble. Having overheard mention of some city names, Jonas speculated that the plane had landed somewhere in South America and that he had been transported north into Central America. Intellect and reason told him that his ransom price was probably political in nature. Reason also told Jonas that unless he could pull off an escape, he was probably one dead bastard.

  Now, after six weeks of moving at night from one crummy shack to another, Jonas knew something was about to happen. He and his five watchdogs had been in their current location for over a week. It was not the Trump Plaza. Constructed primarily of sheets of rusting metal and wishful thinking, the place was a pigsty. Other than a single water pipe, there was no indoor plumbing.

  An hour before, two men had joined their party of six. The discussion had been raging ever since. From the few words Jonas had been able to pick up, he knew something was going on. What he hadn’t been able to figure out was whether that something was a deal or a raid. But whatever it was, it had sure managed to excite his captors and their two visitors. Every one of Jonas’s senses was alert, quivering with an urgency for flight. It was now or never. Raising his head, Jonas added his voice to the babble of the others. He knew that at least two of the men understood English.

  “Hey, I’ve got to relieve myself. Are one of you clowns going to take me out, or do I do my business in here?” He curled his lips into a sneer as he glanced around disdainfully. “Not that it’d make much difference in this cesspool.”

  As he’d expected, Jonas was rewarded for his sarcasm with a backhand rap across the face from the man nearest to him. But as he had hoped, the man snarled an order to one of the others to take Jonas to the “facility.”

  The other man made a gesture with the Uzi that was cradled in the crook of one arm and, head meekly lowered, Jonas preceded him from the shack.

  The “facility” was located at the edge of a thicket, some distance behind the shack. The reason for the distance became apparent yards before reaching the three-foot-wide trench. The stench was awful.

  With the Uzi poking him in the back, Jonas held his breath and stepped to the edge of the trench. Before he was completely finished, the thug behind him gave Jonas a shove with the butt of the gun.

  Cursing the man viciously, Jonas twisted and went sprawling backward into the filth in the trench. He heard the man laugh sadistically—an instant before an earsplitting explosion shook the earth and plunged him into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  The weeks slipped by. Two became four, then five, then six. Holding onto hope for all she was worth, Val persevered. She lost weight, but hung on. She told no one about her pregnancy.

  Between them, Val and Jean-Paul soothed, encouraged, and literally held everything and everyone together…Jonas’s family as well as his business and employees.

  On the second day of the seventh week, Val got home from work to find two men waiting for her. At the sight of Grace’s pale face, Val began to tremble. The men introduced themselves and proffered official-looking identification for her inspection. Feeling the world crashing in on her, Val swallowed convulsively as the older man began to speak.

  “Mrs. Thorne, I regret that I must inform you of the death of your husband, Mr. Jonas Thorne.” He held out a small manila envelope, which she hadn’t noticed at first. “I further regret that these two personal possessions of your husband’s are all that we found at the scene of the devas—”

  “No.” Val’s whisper silenced the man; the scream inside her head silenced her consciousness.

  Jonas!

  Chapter 9

  Val fought through the last clinging webs of slumber. Confusion blurred the line between sleep and consciousness. A frown tugging her brows together, she blinked and glanced around the room.

  Long fingers of late-afternoon sunlight speared through the filmy window curtains, creating patterns of gold and shadow on the opposite wall.

  What time was it? Val wondered, striving for complete awareness. Late afternoon? Early evening? Shifting her head on the pillow, she stared at the bedside clock. Six thirty-four? What was she doing in bed at six thirty-four in the evening?

  Reality r
eturned with sudden clarity, piercing the numbness, restoring memory, stripping away the protective buffer that desensitized her mental anguish.

  Jonas!

  Val’s thinking kicked into gear.

  Those two official-looking men had said Jonas was… No, it wasn’t true; it couldn’t be true. Jonas couldn’t be… But they had identification, and it looked genuine. They had said they were from some federal department. They had said Jonas was… They had brought a small tan envelope that held his personal possessions. No, it could not be true….

  Val’s eyes were now wide. Her gaze darted around the room, searching for a solid point of reference.

  The mental wheels started to spin, and flung Val back seven weeks in time.

  The bedroom! Of course! That was it. She had been pacing the bedroom, frantic with worry, waiting for Jonas to call. The last she remembered it was sunrise. She hadn’t slept all night. That explained why she was in bed at six thirty-four in the evening. Exhausted, she must have finally fallen asleep, slept straight through the day. That was it. Had Jonas called? Had she missed Jonas’s call?

  Something stripped the gears, sending a shudder from Val’s skull to her heels. Her thoughts stopped for a breath-catching instant. When her mind cranked up again, the rhythm was normal, unwinding regulated impulses of lucid thought.

  Jonas hadn’t called at all. Jean-Paul had called. And it had not been earlier that morning. The call from Jean-Paul had come seven weeks ago.

  Jonas was dead. He would never call again.

  “No!” Val sprang up and off the bed as the denial burst from her aching throat. Nausea invaded her stomach, her head whirled, darkness closed in on her and she flailed her arms around for something to hold on to.

  There was nothing there. Val went down. She heard her body thud onto the cushioning carpet, felt a jolt of pain, and responded with a startled cry.

  Val was pushing herself into a sitting position when the bedroom door was flung open.

  “Mon Dieu!” Jean-Paul exclaimed, bursting into the room, Grace at his heels. “Valerie, what has happened?” he asked dropping to one knee beside her.