Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  At a few minutes after eight, doing what I thought might be expected of someone in Emily’s position, I took out the cheapie phone and dialed the number to the HOH hotline once again. It rang a few times, but then I got the same recorded message. There was a part of me that got a little nervous, because it meant he didn’t plan to speak to me on the phone again. The most logical reason for that was because he was going to stick to his pattern and abduct me that very day.

  Well, if that was how it had to be, then I was ready for it to happen. I closed the little flip phone and went to the bedroom to get dressed, stopping quickly in the bathroom to double-check the mask. It looked all right, but then I thought about the fact that I couldn’t afford for it to come loose that day.

  I peeled it off and got out the box, then started the process of cleaning and reattaching it. It took me a little less time, because I was back in practice. If I wore it every day, I could probably do it in ten minutes flat, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Once it was back and looking perfect, I put on a pair of jeans and a nice long-sleeved blouse. I rewrapped the bandage around my left hand, just to be thorough, then grabbed my coat and purse and headed out. I left about nine thirty; I was supposed to be at work by ten, but I was hoping that I’d never get there.

  I started up the car and pulled out onto the street, taking a left turn the way I did every day when I was on the way to Marcus Brothers. I had gone about a block when I happened to glance in the rearview mirror and saw a white van pull out of one of the driveways I had just passed. I wasn’t sure if it was the same one I had seen on Saturday, but my heart started racing and I had to force myself to concentrate on the road ahead.

  I turned left again and went a block up to 15th Street, then turned right onto the busier street. I could have followed 16th all the way to Harvard, but it’s got an awful lot of stop signs. I didn’t want to force the van’s driver to hang back, so this seemed like the logical move. I watched my mirror, and sure enough, the van pulled out onto the street behind me only a couple of moments later.

  I took a sudden left turn on to South Delaware Avenue, flipping on my signal at the last second as though I had suddenly changed my mind about where I was going. I was heading north, passing the University of Tulsa and going on up toward 11th. When I got there, I turned right and then pulled into the Taco Bueno parking lot.

  I had already known the place was closed, because they advertised that they would be closed the entire week before and after Christmas. I stopped in the middle of the parking lot and stared toward the darkened building, and waited to see if Stan was going to take the bait I was offering.

  The big white van came around the corner onto 11th, and I’m certain the driver spotted me instantly. The van started to roll on past, then suddenly whipped into the parking lot and pulled up right behind me.

  I made a show of looking in the rearview mirror, trying my best to make my face look simply annoyed, rather than terrified. I could see a man who was either bald or wearing a crew cut behind the wheel, but then I did exactly what I thought would be normal and took my foot off the brake. I started around the building, but suddenly the van raced forward and came around me on the right, with the end to cut me off.

  I slammed on the brakes, rolled down my window and stuck my head out, yelling at the driver that he was an idiot. As I was yelling, he got out of the car and started walking toward me, so I pulled my head back in and began rolling the window up.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Emily?” The man said, and I instantly recognized the voice. Even though I had been sure it was him, hearing the voice was a shock. I was looking directly at Stan the Strangler, and that’s when my heart began to pound in earnest. “Emily, it’s me. I was running late and I saw you pulling away, so I was following to try to catch up to you.”

  I rolled my window down again and smiled. “Oh, hi,” I said. “Listen, do you want to go back to my place? I mean, we could be alone there.”

  He made an unhappy face. “Actually, I was hoping maybe you would come somewhere with me for a while. It won’t take long, but I’ve got something I want to show you. You can leave your car here, we’ll come back for it later.”

  This was the point at which anyone would start to get nervous, so I dropped the pretense that I was happy to see him. “Um, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I could follow you.”

  He let out a sigh, and then his hand came out of his pocket with a pistol in it. “Emily, I’m sorry, but I have to insist. Get out of the car.”

  I stared at the gun for a moment, then looked at his face as I shut off the car. I slowly unbuckled my seatbelt and opened the door, then stepped out onto the parking lot.

  “Come back to my van and get in, through the side door,” he said. “Emily, don’t try to run, and don’t scream. If you do, I’ll just shoot you right here and now.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “Oh, God, you’re the one who’s been kidnapping those women.”

  “Get into the van,” he said, emphatically this time. I walked slowly toward it and he opened the side door for me. I slid inside and he closed it, then got back behind the steering wheel and passed the pistol to the other man, who was sitting on a box between the two front seats.

  Stan was about five foot ten, probably around forty years old and with a chubby build. The other man, his accomplice, looked to be in his early to mid-twenties and was built like a professional athlete. The guy had muscles on top of his muscles, which I could tell because he was only wearing a T-shirt in spite of the cold. I sat down on the floor, then tucked my hands inside my coat as if they were cold. That gave me the chance to grab the turtle hanging from my neck, and I squeezed with everything I had.

  Stan put the van in gear and turned, driving out of the parking lot through the exit. “Where are we going?” I asked, and the musclebound guy chuckled.

  “We’re going to church,” he said. “Time for you to get right with God.”

  “What? I don’t understand, what is this all about?”

  Stan looked at me in the rearview mirror, which was aimed to let him look at my face. “What’s going on, Emily, is that women have forgotten their place. You women, you call places like the hotline and you complain that your men are being mean to you, but what you’ve forgotten is that God assigned you a place in this world. You are to obey your husband, you are to submit to him in all things. Unfortunately, so many of you have forgotten your place that God has decided it’s time for some of you to learn your lesson.”

  “But—but that’s crazy,” I said. “The world doesn’t work like that anymore.” I was trying to say whatever it would take to keep them off balance, keep them thinking that I was just another of the abused women they seemed to want to pick on. “I mean, it’s even against the law for husbands to be that way, to make us submit to them.”

  “That’s because men became weak. Men became so weak that women began gaining power, and they got so powerful that they enacted laws to protect themselves from having to do what is right. Unfortunately, they cannot enact a law to protect them from God’s will. That is what you’re going to learn about, Emily, about the will of God.”

  I tried to look shocked and frightened, which wasn’t all that difficult considering the gun pointed at me. I sat back against the wall of the van and made every effort to show that I wasn’t going to cause any problems, but in the back of my mind I was cursing myself for not having my own gun with me, even if I did know that having it would probably have caused even more problems.

  The ride took about forty minutes, and went into an area of Tulsa I’d never seen before. There were a lot of dilapidated buildings, some of them showing signs of occupancy while others looked like they were barely standing. The van pulled up to one of them, and Stan got out and opened the sliding door on the side of the building. He got back in, then, and drove the van inside before shutting it off and then going out to close the door.

  He opened the side door again and told me to get
out. I did so, slowly, and finally he grabbed me by my right arm and yanked me to my feet. “Emily, let’s not play games. If you learn your lesson, if you do what you’re told, you will be going home again soon. With any luck, you’ll go home to Darrell and find that you are very happy to be with him. Let me make this perfectly clear, though; if you do not learn, if you do not obey, you will never, ever see him again. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded my head, and that seemed to be sufficient. He held onto my arm while Michael followed, and led me to a door on the inner wall of the building. He opened the door and dragged me through it into a hallway, then opened another door in one of the walls alongside us. There were stairs leading down, and he held onto me as we walked down them, and then along the hallway. I saw several other doors, all of them made of steel and very solid, and then he opened one of them. He pushed me through that one, then slammed the door behind me. I heard it lock, and immediately grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket and tried to dial Alicia.

  The phone was dead, I had no signal at all. I held it up high and down low and moved it around, trying to find even the slightest bit of signal, but there was nothing. I took out the other phone, the little cheap one Alfie had given me, and tried with it as well, but there was still no signal. That would make sense, of course, or else they would have searched me for a phone. The fact that they didn’t bother meant that they knew I wouldn’t be able to call out from inside the building.

  I put both of them back into my pocket, and that’s when I realized that it was totally dark. I had noticed it when they had first shoved me in the room, but I had pulled out my phones immediately and looking at the brightly lit screens gave the illusion of light. I thought about the phones and brought out my own phone again. Reluctantly, I went into the settings menu and told the phone to do a factory reset. That would eliminate all of my contacts, call history and everything, but it would also prevent them from learning the truth of my identity if one of these men were to get hold of it.

  And that’s when it hit me. The transmitter in the turtle worked through cell towers. If there was no cell signal, that meant the cell towers couldn’t pinpoint my location.

  Using my phone as a flashlight, I looked around the room, hoping to find something I might use as a weapon, but it was bare. The biggest item I found was a pebble about the size of a gumball, but that wasn’t going to help me any. I sat down on the cold concrete floor to think, and try to make some sort of plan to help me escape.

  A moment later, I heard a noise from outside my room, so I got up and went to the door and put my ear against it. The sound I was hearing seemed almost like someone singing, so I called out to ask if someone was there.

  The singing stopped, and I called out again. “Hello? Hello? Is somebody there?”

  “Who are you?” It was a woman’s voice that I heard.

  “My name is Emily, Emily Keeler. Who are you?”

  “Bernice. I’m Bernice Montoya. Are you the one they just brought in?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Is there anybody else here?”

  “I’m here,” I heard, and I recognized Wanda Sparks’ voice. She was alive! I had to fight to keep control, to hold back the tears of relief that wanted to come pouring out. “My name is Wanda.”

  “I’m Emily,” I said. “Anybody else?”

  “Candace Lawson,” came another voice, and then a moment later I heard, “Connie, Connie Kirby. I wish we could have met under better circumstances, Emily.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Do any of you know what’s going on?”

  “Oh, yeah, we know,” Bernice said. “The older guy, Frank, he’s going to lecture you about a woman’s place in the world, and then he’s going to tell Michael, his son, to teach you how to respect men. We all go through that every day, and sometimes some of us go through it more than once.”

  Even though I was sure I knew what I was going to hear, I had to ask. “What do you mean, teach us how to respect men? How does he teach us that?”

  “They tie your hands to this bar, and then they lift it up until your feet won’t touch the ground. Then they beat you, they use this big round stick to beat you with. They beat you all up and down your back and your butt and your legs, until you’re just one big bruise.” She whimpered. “It hurts.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. The only thing I could do was hope that Dex had gotten the signal, and that they had at least been able to track it to somewhere close by. If they hadn’t…

  No, I couldn’t let myself think like that. I was locked in a room, or a cell, and the other missing women were close by. All of us were dependent on the plan working as it should, which would have Dex and the police showing up any time.

  “What else do they do?” I called out.

  “That’s pretty much all of it,” Bernice said. “No matter what we do, they just keep beating us. I don’t know how many times I’ve promised to be a good little girl and never complain about Emilio ever again, but they always tell me I’m lying, that I’ll go running off begging for help again.”

  “Is there only the two of them?”

  “Yes,” Bernice said, “or at least that’s all we’ve seen. Hey, you haven’t heard anything about a woman named Carolyn Stern, have you? She was here for a couple of days, then Michael took her out and said something about she had to pay for somebody else.”

  I felt the tears start to form in my eye, but I forced it back. “It was on the news a few days ago,” I said. “They found her body. They said she’d been strangled.”

  “Oh, God,” Bernice said, and I heard Wanda began crying. “Well, I guess that tears it, then. If they killed one, they’re probably going to kill us all.”

  I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor again, and this time the tears came despite my best effort. I took out my phones and checked them again, but there was still no signal of any kind. I sat there and tried to remember everything I’ve ever read about mental telepathy, trying with all my might to broadcast a message to Dex. If he didn’t get the position before the tracker was cut off, I wasn’t sure I was ever going to see him again.

  Time went by, slowly. When you can’t even see daylight, it’s very difficult to tell how much time has passed. I was sure it must have been hours, but when I looked at my phone I saw that just barely over an hour had passed. It was not even eleven o’clock, so I told myself that Dex and the detectives were simply preparing, getting the SWAT team, calling in the National Guard or whatever they had to do to come and rescue us all.

  I started checking my phone every time I felt an hour had gone by, but sometimes it had only been as little as fifteen minutes. I began to understand how prisoners of war could be brainwashed, because the darkness and the sensory deprivation were enough to drive you crazy all on their own. I needed to find some way to hold onto hope, because I had no intention of either dying or losing my mind in that place.

  My phone had a couple of games built into it, so I played a couple rounds of solitaire to try to take my mind off the situation. It helped, at least a little bit. When I shut the phone down to preserve the battery, I was a little less frantic than I had been before, even though it was past three o’clock. I started to accept the fact that the signal had either failed to get through, or had not lasted long enough for Dex to have any idea where I was. There was no way, I knew, that he would have waited this long. Even if the police tried to hold him back, he would have shaken them off and come alone if he had to.

  The singing that I had heard earlier began again, and I realized it was Bernice singing some old gospel hymns. I listened to her rendition of Amazing Grace, followed by What A Friend We Have In Jesus, and suddenly I was flooded with memories from Sunday school and church, back when I was a kid. I hadn’t done nearly as much praying since my burning as I should have, but I got on my knees there in the darkness and asked God to let Dex find me, to let me escape this place alive and have a chance at happiness, after all. I even asked Him to forgive me for all of my sins, and
to forgive me for only turning back to Him when I found myself in the pit of despair.

  I’m not certain if He heard me or not, but I felt better. I suddenly had the feeling that I could make it through this, and that I could somehow make sure these other women came through it, too.

  I thought about a lot of things, sitting there in the darkness. I thought about things my father had taught me, as a girl growing up on a farm. One of the biggest worries he seemed to have when I was a little girl was that one of our animals might hurt me, and he had spent many, many hours coaching me on how to stay safe and protect myself if I had to. We had a few cows, several pigs, God only knows how many chickens and goats, and a half dozen dogs running around the place. Of them all, the pigs were probably the most dangerous to a child, with the dogs running a close second place.

  Daddy told me once that if a dog were to ever try to bite me, I should try to shove my arm or my fist as far into its mouth as I could, because they couldn’t understand why something would push in, rather than trying to pull out. It would make the dog open his mouth and back up, and after a couple of times, the dog would usually decide you weren’t worth the trouble. I actually had occasion to test that theory once, when a neighbor’s pitbull got loose and came after me. When it lunged at me, I balled up my fist and pushed it into the dog’s mouth, and just as Daddy had said, it backed away. I didn’t have to go through it again, because our own dogs attacked it, and I stood there in horror as they tore it to bits.

  Somehow, I didn’t think shoving my fist into Stan’s mouth was going to help me, but it wasn’t the trick itself that was giving me hope, it was the concept of thinking outside the box. Instead of doing what the dog expected, pushing my fist into his mouth confused it and made it back up. Stan and Michael, as far as I was concerned, were nothing but vicious pit bulls, and I had every intention of finding a way to make them back down from me.