Perfect Nightmare

by John Saul

“She was kind of hot on Zack Sorenson,” Tina McCormick said, “but I don’t think he even knew about it.”

  “They never went out?”

  Tina shrugged, but Dawn rolled her eyes. “Zack is going with somebody,” she said, wishing Tina would shut up, since she barely even knew Lindsay.

  “No boyfriends?” Sergeant Grant pressed. “Don’t you all have boyfriends?”

  The girls all nodded except Dawn. “Lindsay didn’t have a boyfriend,” she said firmly.

  “At least not one you knew about,” Tina McCormick taunted.

  “Is she gay?” Sergeant Grant asked, making a note of what the McCormick girl had said.

  Dawn rolled her eyes. The other girls only giggled.

  “What about drugs?” Grant went on.

  The girls glanced at each other, and Dawn could see three of them blushing. “Not Lindsay,” she finally said. “Lindsay was as squeaky clean as you can get.”

  “Not as squeaky as you!” Tina McCormick threw in, and Grant began to wonder if Dawn D'Angelo knew Lindsay Marshall as well as she claimed she did. But when he looked at Sharon Spandler, the coach shrugged.

  “I never heard any talk about Lindsay using,” she said.

  Grant raised his brows noncommittally. In his experience, most of the teachers were as ignorant about kids’ drug use as their parents were. “So the thing that was upsetting her was that her folks wanted to move her to the city?” he asked, his eyes once more sweeping the group.

  And once more it was Dawn D'Angelo who responded. “She was really upset about that. She didn’t want to go—she wanted to spend her senior year here, and be head cheerleader and then graduate with all the rest of us.” She glanced around at the other girls, who were nodding in agreement. “I mean, we all grew up together—she hated the idea of going someplace she didn’t know with a bunch of kids she didn’t know.”

  “How unhappy was she about that?” Grant asked.

  “Very,” Dawn said. “Very, very, extremely.”

  The other girls nodded again, and so did Sharon Spandler.

  “Unhappy enough to run away?” the policeman went on.

  A long silence fell over the group gathered around the cafeteria table—a silence that told Grant as much as anything the girls had actually said out loud.

  They didn’t know.

  They didn’t know anything at all.

  Sergeant Grant took business cards from his shirt pocket and handed them around the table. “If you can think of anything, no matter how small, or if you hear something, call me, okay?”

  “Do you think she’s all right?” someone asked.

  “I hope so,” he said, standing up and closing his notebook. The girls watched in silence as he turned away from the table and walked out of the cafeteria.

  Sergeant Grant sat quietly for a moment in his warm car with his eyes closed. There were no red flags in this case.

  No sign of forced entry to the home.

  No hint of anyone who Lindsay might have gotten on the wrong side of—no boyfriends, no drug dealers.

  Apparently no enemies at all.

  But unhappy.

  Very unhappy, and probably very angry at her parents.

  He sighed, picked up his notebook, made a few notes about his interview with Lindsay’s friends, then radioed his office.

  “I still think she’s a runaway,” he said. “We’ll keep our eyes open and keep talking to people, but I’m thinking she’ll show up by the end of the week. Give her some time to cool off.”

  Still, as he started his car and pulled away from the curb in front of Camden Green High, he wondered once more about that real estate agent. What was his name?

  Mancuso—that was it. Rick Mancuso.

  Something in his voice just hadn’t sounded right.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Lindsay’s eyes opened slowly.

  She was still bound to the chair, still surrounded by darkness. Darkness hiding terrors she could feel, even if she couldn’t see them. But even closer than the terrors concealed in the darkness were the ones inside her.

  Pain.

  Numbness.

  Exhaustion.

  And thirst.

  A thirst so terrible it threatened to consume her. Her lips were swollen and cracked, her tongue dry. She ached for water. Visions began to dance in the darkness around her—brief glimpses of the water her body craved: herself, swimming in the school pool; birds, flitting in water fountains; cold ocean spray breaking over rocks; glasses of chilled soda; lawn sprinklers soaking cool green grass. She wanted to reach for the visions, touch them, feel the water. But her body had long ago gone from mild discomfort to aching and twitching, and now it felt coldly numb. And the thirst was so overwhelming that even her eyelids felt like sandpaper as they moved across eyeballs gone dry from lack of moisture.

  If she cried, she knew she would shed no tears—the thirst made her feel as if every drop of water had been leached from her body.

  She tried to whisper to Shannon but no sound came from her parched throat. And was Shannon even there anymore? She strained to listen, searching in the silence for the sound of the other girl’s breathing, but heard nothing.

  She let her eyelids close, and silently prayed for unconsciousness.

  A sound.

  A scraping sound. Then bright light—a light so dazzling she reflexively twisted her head away. Then she slowly opened her eyes, and her heart pounded as she felt whatever evil that had locked her in this dungeon come closer.

  Steeling herself, she twisted her head around to face the evil looming over her, but all she saw was a black silhouette in the blinding light.

  Then she heard a voice—Shannon’s voice—moan a single word: “No.”

  Now, in the glow filling the chamber, Lindsay could see her crouched on a mattress on the floor of what seemed to be a long, narrow, unfinished basement. Shannon’s back was pressed to the wall and her knees pressed against her chest, as if they could somehow protect her from the evil presence that hung against the bright light. Her long, dark hair was matted, and the deathly pallor of her face made her look far older than Lindsay, though her voice sounded much younger.

  As the dark silhouette took form and became the figure of a man, Shannon moaned again and hid her face against her knees.

  The man passed Shannon and came directly toward her. Lindsay’s heart pounded so hard she could hear it throbbing in her ears, and her breath caught in her lungs.

  He came close enough so her nostrils filled with the same musky odor he’d left in her bedroom.

  He set something on the floor, then touched her.

  Touched her breast, squeezing the nipple so hard it hurt.

  She reflexively tried to jerk away from his touch, but the object pressing against her throat kept her from moving her head more than a fraction of an inch.

  Then he was holding something in front of her, and for an instant Lindsay was certain it was another hallucination. But then he gently fed the straw emerging from the neck of a water bottle through her parched lips.

  Reflexively, she began to suck.

  Water!

  Fresh, cool water!

  She greedily drank as fast as the straw could deliver the soothing liquid across her tongue, certain that at any moment her captor would snatch it away.

  And all too soon, he did . . .

  Lindsay licked her lips and peered up at him.

  A scream rose in her throat as she saw the leering grin that hovered above her, but it died away to little more than a helpless gurgling sound as she realized that he wasn’t grinning at all.

  He was wearing a mask.

  A white surgeon’s mask upon which two huge and lascivious lips had been drawn with some kind of red marker. Above the surgeon’s mask his face was covered with a black ski mask, his eyes glinting almost invisibly from deep beneath the eyeholes.

  His body was cloaked with a black raincoat.

  Then her thirst broke through her terror and her hea
d tipped up, almost against her own will. “Please,” she whispered, her voice sounding as if someone else must have uttered the single word.

  “Quiet!” the man commanded. He reached for her breast once more, and though every fiber of her being wanted to shrink away, her need for water was stronger. She made herself hold still beneath his touch, and finally he held the bottle to her lips once more.

  He bent down, and when he straightened, he held a bowl and spoon.

  Lindsay’s eyes fixed on the bowl, and her exhausted mind groped to understand what he might be doing.

  But it didn’t matter: if he drugged her, she would at least fall into the bliss of unconsciousness.

  If he killed her, she would be forever released from his prison and her own terror.

  She opened her mouth and let him feed her.

  Oatmeal! Oatmeal, sweetened with brown sugar and cinnamon.

  And milk!

  She swallowed and opened her mouth for more.

  Part of her was revolted that she was letting him touch her just so she could have water and food, but the food itself ignited a hunger she hadn’t realized was there.

  She swallowed every morsel he offered, and sucked down as much water as she could manage when he held the bottle to her lips again.

  She felt her body begin to tingle as its numbness gave way to the infusion of energy the food and water provided.

  “Please,” she whispered quietly to him. “Please let us go.”

  “You never let me go,” he said, but a moment later she could feel him ripping the tape away from her ankles.

  She could barely move her knees, and couldn’t feel her feet at all, nor move her ankles.

  Then he tore the tape from her wrists, and her arms dropped from the hard wood into her lap. She moved her fingers and tried to get one hand over to the other to massage her throbbing wrist, but it was too much.

  Her joints screamed with pain and her muscles refused to obey the commands of her mind.

  The man untied the object that had pressed against her throat, and she finally saw what it was—a metal bit, the kind she’d seen on horses. Tentatively, fearfully, she rotated her head on her neck. But it was all right; nothing pressed against her throat, nothing strangled her breath.

  He peeled the blanket away from her, then grabbed her by the arms and pulled her to her feet. Her legs still numb, Lindsay stumbled and fell against him, and as her body came in contact with his, her nostrils filled with the musky odor she’d first smelled in her bedroom on Wednesday afternoon.

  Could it have been that recently? The time when every muscle in her body hadn’t ached and her soul hadn’t been filled with terror was a memory so dim it seemed years ago.

  Could it only have been a few days?

  She tried to resist her captor, tried to pull away, but she couldn’t even straighten her back, let alone find the strength to twist herself out of his grip. He half carried her away from the chair to a mattress on the floor, where he shoved her down, hurling her body with enough force that she could feel the hard concrete even through the thick padding.

  A low wall separated her mattress from the one a few feet away, on which Shannon cowered. But the wall was just high enough so she could no longer see the other girl.

  The man closed hard, cold, metal handcuffs around Lindsay’s wrists, then chained the cuffs to the wall behind her.

  From the pocket of the raincoat, he produced a packet that looked vaguely familiar, but Lindsay didn’t quite recognize it until he tore it open and pulled the contents loose from the foil.

  Baby wipes.

  The kind she had seen mothers use on their infant children in the restrooms at the mall.

  She cringed, and had to force herself not to give him the satisfaction of uttering even a single sound as he pulled her panties away and began cleaning her.

  “How do you like it?” he asked as he worked. “Do you like it as much as I did?” Tossing the wipe aside, he put what looked like a dish towel between her legs, pinned it like a diaper, and covered her with a ragged blanket.

  He vanished behind the low wall, and a few seconds later Lindsay heard Shannon’s chains rattling. “No,” she croaked. “Please . . . no . . . please . . .”

  Then Lindsay saw him again, straightening up, pulling Shannon to her feet and half leading, half dragging her across the chamber floor. Naked, Shannon was so thin Lindsay could see the knobs of her spine and hollows between her ribs.

  “Please . . . no . . . please . . .” Shannon whispered again, the words coming like a mantra. “. . . No . . . please . . . no . . .”

  Every muscle in Lindsay’s body tensed, and she wanted to hurl herself on the man and tear Shannon from his grip. But her wrists were cuffed and chained to the wall, and she knew her body was too weak anyway.

  She watched helplessly as he opened a door on the far side of the long room, half carried Shannon through it, and closed it behind them, abruptly cutting off Shannon’s whispered pleas as a terrible, hollow silence fell over the dungeon.

  Lindsay was alone.

  She felt like crying, but refused to give in to the urge, knowing even through her terror that it would do no good.

  She closed her eyes against the threat of tears and stretched her legs out to their full length.

  As the oatmeal and water fed the tiniest bit of strength back into her body, and the numbness and tingling in her legs and arms finally began to ease, she tried not to think about what was happening to Shannon, and what might soon be happening to her, too.

  And there was no way out.

  No way out at all.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The sound of the door echoed oddly as Steve Marshall closed it behind Sergeant Grant.

  Sergeant Andrew Grant, he thought as he sank back onto the sofa next to his wife. How had it happened that until tonight he’d never even thought of the cop in terms of having a first name, let alone wondered what it was?

  Not that it mattered, for knowing Grant’s first name hadn’t changed a thing. Not one single thing. His beautiful, wonderful, perfect wife still looked every bit as hollowed out and ashen as she had before the policeman arrived to fill them in on his progress.

  And Lindsay was still gone.

  And no one—not her friends or the police or Kara, or he himself—had any better idea of what happened to her than they had on the day she vanished.

  The only thing new was that he now knew Sergeant Grant’s first name.

  And he and Kara were once again sitting side by side, not talking, feeling the emptiness of their home. As the silence threatened to overwhelm them both, faint echoes of Sergeant Grant’s visit seemed to whisper from the walls of their home, and Steve reached out to take Kara’s small, pale hand in his own.

  “She’s not a runaway,” Kara said, as if responding to the same echo Steve had heard.

  He hesitated, wishing he could offer her some scrap of evidence—anything—to share with her the same faint hope he was still clinging to that Sergeant Grant was right and at any moment the phone could ring, or the door could open, and their daughter would be with them once more. But he couldn’t. All he could do was hold her hand.

  “What did he mean, there was no evidence of foul play?” Kara asked, her voice as hollow as the house had been since Lindsay vanished.

  “He meant that teenage girls do things when they’re upset,” Steve said, choosing his words carefully. “You know that. Remember when you were seventeen? Remember what the girls in your class were thinking about? How many of them were constantly angry at their parents and threatening to run away? You know what he was talking about, Kara.”

  It was as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “He said there was no evidence,” she whispered, almost to herself. “But she’s gone. Her blanket is gone. What kind of evidence does he want?”

  “Kara—”

  Finally, she looked at him. “Where would she go? With who? Oh, God, we’ve been over this a thousand times, Steve. You know a
s well as I do that Lindsay’s no runaway!”

  “Honey, maybe he’s right,” Steve began. For the last hour, as Andrew Grant had gone over every tiny scrap of information he’d garnered about Lindsay’s disappearance—which was essentially nothing—Steve had allowed himself to hope that maybe the sergeant was right—that Lindsay had just taken off in a fit of anger, wanting to punish them the same way teenagers everywhere wanted to punish their parents. And if he could hang onto that, he could hang onto hope that when she cooled off, she would, indeed, come home.

  At least it was something.

  Kara pulled her hand from his. “All he really came to tell us,” she said, “was that they’re not going to do anything.”

  Steve put his arm around his wife. “They are,” he told her. “They’re just doing what the police do—they’re the experts in these things. We have to be strong and have faith.”

  She paid no attention to him. “They ought to call the FBI. But they won’t, because—”

  “Because we don’t know it’s a kidnapping,” Steve broke in, and immediately wished he could retract his words.

  “Not to them, it isn’t,” Kara flared. “But I know better.” She picked at a cuticle that was already seeping blood, and when she spoke again, her voice had hardened. “I know better.” She turned to face him. “Tomorrow I’m going to organize a group to post flyers all over Long Island. I’ve already blanketed the town, but it’s not enough. And I’m going to call the FBI myself, if Sergeant Grant isn’t going to, and then I’m going to start distributing flyers in the city. And you can—” She fell abruptly silent and her eyes searched his. “What is it?” she asked when he looked away.

  Steve hesitated, then, realizing there was no point in waiting until morning to tell her, said softly, “Honey, I have to go back to the office tomorrow.”

  It was as if he’d struck her. “Your office? Tomorrow?”

  He reached out to her. “I have to. There are so many things no one else can take care of, and—”

  “You believe him,” Kara said, her voice suddenly flat. “You believe Sergeant Grant.” Her voice rose. “You think that if we don’t do anything, Lindsay will just come home!”