by Tracy Sharp
Images of Colleen’s frozen body lying on the frozen lake flashed in my mind. Other women were still missing. Part of me didn’t want to think about it. The other part, desperate for hope that they were somehow okay, grasped on to that thought. Once Rina discovered that I wasn’t really pregnant, she’d definitely try to kill me. Now that she had my gun she’d be harder to fight. She was far more dangerous than she had been before.
Right, like she hadn’t been dangerous before. I thought of Colleen’s abdomen, once full with a baby, cut open. Empty.
I placed a shaking hand over my mouth to stifle a sob. Took several deep breaths.
Don’t panic. Just don’t panic.
I pushed myself up and began walking the room, starting from the outermost edges, looking at the floor for anything I could find. Anything that would tell me something about this nutcase who had locked me in a basement room.
My mind was still foggy, but getting a little clearer. I focused on the carpet and the bit of floor between the carpet and the wall. Slowly moving, I took a couple of steps and looked at the space about three feet from where I stood. Doing something productive kept me from going into a blind panic and screaming my lungs out. I kept walking, stopping, looking. Walking, stopping, looking.
Something caught my attention. Something reddish in color. I moved toward it, squatting down for a closer look. My heart thudded, realization dawning on me. My mouth dropped open. Slowly reached out and picked it up.
A thin lock of long, wavy hair. Strawberry blonde. Still attached to one end, a tiny piece of dried, bloody skin.
Colleen’s.
Chapter Eighteen
I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. A rush of adrenaline moved through me. Now or never. I covered the few steps to the light switch on the balls of my feet and flipped it off, then moved silently to one side of the door. Light shone through the crack between the door and the jamb, lending me enough light to be able to tell where the door was. I moved back, pressing my back against the wall.
The steps stopped outside the door. Silence. She was listening.
I slowed my breathing. The frantic beat of my heart sounded in my ears.
A sliding sound, then a click. Another sliding sound and click lower on the door. One more, lower. She turned a lock under the knob.
I braced myself.
The door slowly opened.
The light from the hallway shone on the empty bed. I could actually feel her momentary confusion, and then alarm.
I stepped out in front of her, swinging my arm as I went, and hit her in the throat.
She raised the gun as she stumbled back. Instinctively I moved back, behind the wall, anticipating that she’d pull the trigger. She did, hitting the wall across the room. The gunfire sounded like a bomb in the silence of the house.
I moved toward the door again, realizing that if I didn’t get through that door right now she’d shut me in again.
But she’d righted herself quickly and came straight for me. I didn’t step back, refused to move further into that room.
She pressed the barrel of the gun to my forehead. I looked into her eyes. They were pools of nothingness. Killing me meant nothing. She was going to kill me anyway. But she wanted my baby first.
We stood like that for what seemed like a full minute, only the ragged sound of her breathing in the room with us. She watched me with those dead eyes, wanting more than anything to put a bullet in my head.
A drop of sweat moved from my hairline dribbled down my forehead and over my eyelid. I blinked it away.
Without speaking, she pushed me back into the room. Keeping the gun trained on me, she stepped back out, pulling the door shut tight behind her.
I listened, my heart sinking, as each lock slid back into place.
* * *
I stood staring at the door for a long time. The thought that I might not get out of there kept repeating itself in my mind. I admonished myself for not having overtaken her while I had the chance. I should’ve gone right for her when she stumbled back. But I wasn’t thinking clearly yet. My brain still foggy from the drug she’d slipped into my coffee.
She wasn’t going to fall for that stunt again. I’d have to get more creative. I turned and stared at the carpet, my stomach clenching. Flipping the light switch again, I scanned the pattern on the carpet, wanting to take it all in at once, desperate to find something, anything that would help me somehow.
It wasn’t until I looked at the carpet as a whole that I saw them. Dark stains here and there. Different sizes, different patterns. I went over to one, squatted down. A reddish brown stain that had been washed to fade it was still visible. The carpet was a dark taupe multi-colored design. The stains were not easy to spot. But I saw them hyper clearly now. They were all over the carpet. It was too much blood loss for one person to sustain for very long. But the horror of the truth was setting in.
This wasn’t the blood of just one person.
I started to get a picture of what had happened down there. I’d read about women like Rina, and had seen stories of women like her on the news. Women who abducted pregnant women for their unborn babies. What had Lucas called it? Abduction by cesarean section. I wondered if Rina was the woman Lucas had told us about. The woman who had attempted to abduct the infant from the arms of her mother in the hospital parking lot. If this were the same woman, she’d decided that it would be easier to abduct a pregnant woman than try to steal a baby from a new mother. Was Rina the one who had placed the ad on Craig’s List for baby clothes?
How many women had Rina lured and abducted for their babies? From the amount of blood on the carpet, it looked like she’d botched the job more than once. Clearly, she would continue until she was caught. Was it the fantasy of giving birth that she kept going back to? Or was it really that she wanted a newborn baby? If it were simply the fantasy, more pregnant woman would disappear until Rina was caught.
I couldn’t think about it anymore. I refused to let the implications of it reach my heart.
I started my slow walk again. Walking, stopping, looking. Walking, stopping, looking.
Sometime, hours later I was sure, I looked at my watch.
The second hand no longer moved around the face. The minute and hour hand read ten-thirty a.m. I’d reached Rina’s house at about that time. The batteries had died. My watch was dead.
* * *
Cold. I was slowly waking up, feeling so cold. I’d have to turn the heat up. I wondered if there was something wrong with the furnace. Light outside my lids made my eyes hurt. That meant it was morning. I’d slept in and Pango would have to go outside. I reached out my hand to feel her beside me. Her side of the bed was empty. I felt myself frown. Opened my eyes.
I was in the same basement room with the blood stains on the carpet. Still locked in, waiting for a maniac to come back downstairs. Maybe deciding that I was too much trouble, that my baby was thirty-eight weeks along and would be fine if delivered prematurely.
The lock of hair with the skin and dried blood attached hadn’t been the only thing I’d found. A front top tooth had been laying at the edge of the carpet, just under the bed, spotted in dried blood. The depth of my terror for the women who had been there before and for myself, was complete. I was one tough bitch, but if I couldn’t fight this lunatic, I’d die down there in that basement.
Chilled, I sat up, pulling the blanket from the bed and wrapping it around me. It smelled of mildew. I pulled it off me and let it drop back down to the bed. Something caught my eye about the pale yellow fitted bed sheet. I squinted down at it. The coloration of the mattress beneath the sheet was uneven. Some of the mattress was dark.
I jumped back, away from the bed.
“Jesus,” I breathed. “Jesus.”
Slowly, I peeled fitted sheet off the bed.
An enormous, dark bloodstain covered the top mattress.
I turned away, squeezing my eyes shut and placing both hands over my eyes.
“Oh, my God. Oh,
my God.”
Get it together, Leah. Get it together or you will die down here.
I started pacing again. This basement was a place of death. It was a killing room.
I moved my hands over my face, rubbing them up and down over my cheeks, trying to get some sensation on my skin. Anything to distract me from the rising panic.
A muffled cry sounded from the other side of a wall.
I stopped breathing. Listened.
Another cry. Somebody was moaning. In pain.
In labor?
I followed the sound to the wall on the far left side of the room. I hit the wall several times with the palm of my hand. “Hello?”
A voice cried from the other side of the wall, “Oh, God. Help me, please.”
“Shhhh. Don’t be too loud. She’ll come back down,” I said to her, my voice close to the wall. “Are you all right?”
“I’m in labor. Please help me,” she whimpered.
“I’m going to help you,” I said, the irony of that sentence making me pause. I couldn’t even help myself. How the hell was I going to help this woman? “What’s your name?”
“Susan Wilson,” she said.
“Susan. We’ve been looking for you. I’m going to try to get you out of there. I need to get out of here, first.” Excitement made me giddy. A glimmer of hope. Suddenly I felt like I could get out of this alive.
“Please hurry.” She said, then a moan.
When Rina discovered that she was in labor, it would be all over for Susan. “Susan, you need to block that door.”
“What? No. I need help.”
“Listen to me. Rina is going to come down the stairs and take your baby from you if she gets into that room. Do you understand? She will kill you after she takes your baby.” I hated telling her this, but she had to understand. She had to do anything she could to keep Rina from getting in there with her.
“Oh, my God.”
“Is there something you can use to block the door? The bed?”
“Yes.” There was a pause. I could hear her grunting with the effort of trying to push the bed. “It’s so heavy.” Her voice was further away.
“Just push it as hard as you can, Susan. You have to block that door.”
Small little scraping sounds against the floor. It was taking too long.
“God. Please hurry, Susan.”
More scraping sounds.
Footsteps on the stairs.
I started crying out, yelling. “Oh, no! My baby is coming! Somebody help me! Help!”
Susan stopped moving the bed.
I hoped she got the drift.
She did. More scraping sounds.
“Help me! Somebody!” I cried.
The footsteps stopped. I couldn’t tell if she was standing outside my door, or Susan’s.
The locks slid aside, one after another, gingerly. She’d be expecting me to be hiding beside the door. Instead I sat on the floor, unable to make myself go anywhere near the bed, and held my fake belly. I took several short breaths, blowing them out in short bursts, the way I’d seen pregnant women do it in the movies, and prayed that I was convincing. I cried out again, moaning, trying to cover any sounds that Susan was making in the next room.
The door opened slowly, just a crack at first. I saw an eye and a slice of face in the crack of the door, and I could not remember, at that point in time, if I’d ever seen anything so spooky. But what really scared me was that this wasn’t Rina. This person was taller. Her eyes narrower. Familiar.
Once she’d determined that I wasn’t near the door, she opened it wide, staring at me with my gun aimed at my head.
Noel.
Chapter Nineteen
Still watching me, she called over her shoulder. “You really messed up this time, Rina.”
“What?” Rina said from somewhere out in the hall. She was wiggling the door knob to the room Susan was in. Pounding on it.
“She’s not pregnant,” Noel said.
The pounding stopped. Rina’s face appeared behind and just above Noel’s shoulder. “What are you talking about? Look at her.”
“This is one of the private investigators I was telling you about. Leah Ryan.”
Rina looked at me, wide eyed.
Noel cocked the gun, her finger on the trigger. “And now she has to die.”
* * *
She was going to shoot me dead if I didn’t come up with something fast. “Jack is smarter than that, Noel. He’ll figure you out, if he hasn’t already.”
“Obviously I can’t let you walk away,” Noel said, as if she were talking to a four year old.
Susan cried out in the other room. She sobbed.
Rina’s head snapped around to listen. She disappeared again.
“You need help delivering that baby in there. Somebody keeps botching the job.”
Noel squinted at me. “You know how to deliver babies?”
“I know that giving a woman a cesarean when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing will most likely kill the unborn baby. I’m sure you’ve figured that out.”
She stared at me, eyes calculating.
“Look. I really don’t want another baby to die. Okay? Please. Let me help. At least I’ll know that the baby is okay.” I didn’t mention that Gabriel had said that she’d murdered her own baby, which had to have been intentional. It had to be some kind of weird compulsion. She had some deep seated, deranged urge to murder babies. But she had a girlfriend who really wanted an infant, and I was guessing that she’d do just about anything to keep her. Which desire would win out this time?
“Do you want that baby to die, Noel?”
She stared at me, saying nothing.
“Rina really wants a baby, doesn’t she? She’ll leave you if she doesn’t get a live one soon. You know that, don’t you? Maybe she’ll even turn to a man to get her pregnant.”
Her face hardened. “No man is going to touch her. Ever.” Her voice was like stone. “I tried that. Got pregnant. For her. Didn’t turn out so good.”
“You killed your baby, didn’t you, Noel?”
“Didn’t turn out so good,” she repeated, her eyes shuttering over. “I told her it wouldn’t. It’s better to get a baby from somebody else. You don’t suffer that way.”
No. Only the unfortunate mother and the baby suffer. I marveled at how crazy a person could be and still function. This woman was a fruit-loop. “I can help with the baby. You need to let somebody else handle the birth this time. Let me be part of a miracle before I die. Let my life have some meaning. Please?”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “You make one wrong move and I’ll blow your pretty head off. Got it?”
I nodded quickly. “Absolutely.”
“Get up.” She stepped aside, gestured to the hallway.
I pushed myself up.
“Get rid of that fake belly. You’re nothing but a fraud.” She spat this last part out, red faced.
Yeah. Okay. I’m the fraud. I whistled low in my mind. I went out into the hallway and relief washed over me, just being out of that death room gave me renewed energy and my mind cleared of cobwebs. Even if she shot me in the back out in that hall, it would be better than dying in that room.
Rina stood staring at the door to the room Susan was in. She turned to look at us as we entered the hallway. “I’m going upstairs to get something big to knock the door down.” Her tone was matter of fact as she started up the stairs.
“Okay, honey,” Noel said. She had a slightly pained look on her face, which said that she knew that Rina wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, but she loved her anyway.
How sweet.
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Tell her to open the door,” Noel said, sarcasm lacing her tone, like I was the biggest idiot she’d ever had to endure.
I knocked on the door. “Susan?”
“Yes,” she moaned, crying.
“Do not open this door,” I screamed, throwing myself back and knocking Noel backwar
d. She grunted, and I turned and dodged to the side. The gun went off as she fell, and I jumped on her, hauling back and punching her in the face. Her head snapped back, hitting the back of the wooden step behind her. She was half sitting, half lying on the stairs and I brought my hand back and smashed the back of her head against the step. She dropped the gun.
I grabbed it and knocked the hell out of her with the butt, bringing the gun down two, three, four times. It took that many until I realized that she wasn’t moving. I felt for a pulse. She had one. That was good enough.
Rina’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. “I can’t find anything to use, Noel.”
I waited until I saw her legs, then I shot her in one of them. She screamed and fell down the stairs, knocking Noel down to the floor as she went. She no longer had the gun in her hand. She must’ve laid it down during her search for a large object to bust the door open with.
I banged on the door. “Susan! Open the door.”
“No,” came the voice.
“Susan, we don’t have much time. They’re both out of commission, but not for long. Hurry up.” I banged on the door with my open hand.
“No.”
“You will die in there! Open the damned door!”
I could hear her crying. Groaning and weeping, and the sound was so helpless that a knot rose in my throat and I felt like crying myself.
“Please, Susan. I know you’re scared. But if you don’t let me in, we’ll never get out of here, either of us. Because I’m not leaving you and your baby.”
I could hear her moving. Shuffling. It had to be hard as hell with labor pains taking over every few minutes.
A hand clamped over my ankle and yanked and I fell backward, but caught myself with a hand on the wall and one on the railing before I fell. Rina reached up, swiping a hand at my gun. I turned and booted her in the head. The same treatment I’d given Gabriel. I wanted to shoot her and Noel dead where they lay. Make sure they never hurt another human being, another pregnant mother, another unborn infant, ever again. But there had been so much death already. I didn’t have the stomach for it. And there was something really wrong about murdering two people and then helping bring a baby into the world.