by Andrew Hart
“Jan,” he said, striding over. “So glad you could make it!”
I half extended my hand, but he closed in for the hug and pecked me once on the cheek. I burbled into his neck, flustered, scanning the space behind him for signs of the others.
“Just me?” I asked, trying to sound like it didn’t matter one way or the other.
“Marcus and Gretchen are already here. And Melissa, of course. Kristen and Brad get in later. I figure we’ll get you settled; then maybe we’ll head down to the beach at the Minos for the afternoon. For old times’ sake. It’s a bit of a trek, but I’ll be able to collect Kristen and Brad around five before we go home for the evening.”
The Minos was the hotel where we all met five years ago. Well, not quite “all.” One name stood out and made me stare at him like a startled bird.
Who the hell was Gretchen?
And not just Gretchen. Marcus and Gretchen. As if they were together. My stomach squirmed and knotted, but I said nothing.
“This everything?” asked Simon, eying my luggage approvingly.
“Yes. It’s only a week, after all.”
“Travel light, travel fast,” said Simon. He was wearing short sleeves, and his arms were bunched and veined with the fruits of his hours in the gym. Slim jeans—designer, I suspected, but not showy or broadcasting the brand—and brown leather loafers without socks. You’d never mistake someone so fair for a local, but he looked in his element, absolutely comfortable. But then, he always did. As I said, I had no idea what he did beyond the fact that it involved moving around millions of dollars of other people’s money—and earning millions for himself in the process—but I imagined he looked just as at ease and in control on trading floors, in board rooms, on golf courses, and in high-end cocktail bars, dressed in each case appropriately, fashionably, and with that apparent carelessness that made it all look so effortless. Marcus used to have a word for that last part, an old Italian term I couldn’t remember. It meant something like the ability to pass off as natural and spontaneous what was actually studied and deliberate. I’d have to ask him when I saw him.
If you can tear him away from Gretchen.
The name annoyed me. It sounded vaguely Nordic or German, and the image that popped into my head was the St. Pauli beer girl, with braided flaxen hair and cleavage you could lose a rabbit in.
Simon was talking, and I turned my attention back to him as he led me through the airport toward the doors that opened onto the hot, bright parking lot. Looking at him from behind, I wondered if some of that sartorial effortlessness was actually Melissa’s handiwork, though I found it hard to imagine her picking out his ties and brushing lint from his jacket like some fifties housewife.
“I said, ‘Did you see much of Rome?’” Simon repeated.
“Oh,” I replied. “No, it was just a layover. But I saw the Colosseum from the air.”
“Really?” he said, pulling a face. “Did the plane have to circle or something?”
I hesitated.
“I don’t think so. Why?” I said.
“The airport is close to the coast,” he remarked. “You’d have to go pretty far inland to get a look at the city, and then I’d imagine you’d be too high to really . . .”
“Must have been mistaken,” I said quickly. “I slept a lot on the way in. Maybe I dreamed it.”
He gave a little laugh, but I saw nothing else in his face as he pushed through the outer doors, so I decided to leave it alone.
It was pleasantly, surprisingly warm in Heraklion. I remembered the June heat of my last visit as a physical shock, a blistering, searing sunshine that stood breathless and unmoving in the shadeless parking lot. Charlotte was hot and I was used to it, but the air in Crete had felt thinner somehow, and while that meant it didn’t have the mugginess of home, the sun seemed more intense and relentless: a desert heat. On the plane I had remembered how much I had burned on that beach five years ago, and another stupid pulse of panic coursed through me then even as I reminded myself that it was November. But now the weather was glorious. Midseventies, the sky clear, a slight breeze full of promise and comfort, and Simon had already said we were going to the beach after all. Like the old children’s game, if Simon said it, you had to go along.
Simon made for the biggest, sleekest, shiniest car in the lot and made it beep with a fob in his pocket. It was a huge boatlike Mercedes van, black and new and screaming money. It had tinted windows and looked like it should come with champagne on ice and celebrities fleeing paparazzi.
“Nice,” I said.
“Only the best for our friends,” said Simon.
My heart sank a little, but I rallied. I was newly promoted. A salaried executive team leader. Moving up in the world.
“Gonna be a great week,” he remarked, pushing a pair of Ray-Ban aviators on and turning the engine over. “Lots to catch up on. Old haunts to revisit. Remember that guy who used to sell peaches from a stand outside the Minos? The one with the mangy dog who peed on Brad’s foot? I drove by today, and I swear he was still there. Same guy. Same dog!”
He laughed delightedly.
I looked out of the heavily tinted windows as we pulled onto the road, and I tried to laugh along, but it was cold in the car with its blasting AC, and all I could think of was old haunts.
I shouldn’t have come.
Chapter Three
The screaming doesn’t last. The sheer volume in my little prison shocks it out of me long before it can shred my throat, the sound of my own terror jarring me into numbness. Still, the exertion of all that crying leaves me light-headed, and that’s scary too.
I sit up as best I can, my left arm resting unnaturally far from my body because of the manacle, and I try to decide if the darkness has lessened. I don’t think it has because I can make out no light source, so the softening of the blackness, the vague sense that there are shapes only a few feet from the concrete platform where I am chained, must be my eyes adjusting. I remember dimly from one of my biology classes that the sensitivity of the human eye increases massively in the first few minutes of being exposed to the dark, but I am pretty sure it’s a short-lived phenomenon. It’s not like the longer I sit here, the better my night vision will be. I’ve been awake several minutes now and am sure this is as good as it’s going to get.
Thinking about such things has slowed my heart. I can feel it easing in my chest, as if I were over-revving an engine but have now taken my foot off the gas, though my breath is still thin and gasping. It’s noisy, more sobbing than breathing, and the air feels strangely thin. The room smells of damp and earth and the very slightly chemical staleness of old concrete, and on top of it is the vibrant, rusty tang of blood.
What the hell is going on?
I force myself to be quiet, to sit and listen for any sound that isn’t made by me, like I’m reaching out with my ears into the darkness. Then I take a breath, swallow, and say “Hello?”
There is no reply, but I say it again, louder this time, listening to the fractional and instantaneous echo. I try it again, speaking like a sound engineer at a concert Marcus and I went to years ago.
“One, two. One two,” I say, spitting the T sound as the roadie had done. “One, two. Two. Two. Two.”
It had amused me at the time, his earnestness as he made the nonsense noises before giving his thumbs-up to some invisible colleague in the sound booth at the back of the hall. I hadn’t really processed what he was doing, but I understood it instinctively now. He was listening to the shape of the sound as it went from microphone to speakers, the pop of air on the consonants, and I realize I am doing the same. I am doing what bats or dolphins do, bouncing sound to get a sense of where things are. I can’t read the results like animals, but I feel in my bones the way the sound brings the walls of my cell in. I can’t see them, but I instinctively know that the room is very small. Maybe only ten feet square. And while three walls are hard and flat—stone or concrete, probably the latter—the fourth is somehow different. Not soft
er, exactly, but more absorbent. A door. Large and wooden. Sensing that it is there, I think now that I can almost see it, a deeper blackness in the gloom.
I frown, marveling at my little discovery, trying not to admit how little that gave me to work with. There is also an irregularity in the wall directly across from the bed, the way I am facing and almost level with my steady, if largely useless, gaze. A panel? Or a cupboard mounted on the wall? I can just make it out as a dark rectangle. I reach for it, stretching as far as I can, but get nothing but air. I swing my feet down to the floor and get the uneven shock of finding I have one bare foot and one still wearing what feels like a sandal.
My sandal.
Thin leather straps and a little thong over the top of my foot gathering around the ankle and looping around the big toe.
My sandal. I can see it in my head, and with it comes the sense of things remembered but hidden in shadow just out of arm’s reach.
Crete. I came to Crete. To see old friends.
I remember packing, laying out colorful clothes on the bed at home, taking the plane, but after that . . . I frown and regroup. I am Jan Fletcher. I live in Charlotte and work at the Great Deal store on Tryon in the University area. I drive a white Camry, bought secondhand from the Town and Country dealership on South Boulevard. I can see my apartment in my head: the fading, hand-stenciled vines on the bathroom wall, the smell of the neighbor’s ratty terrier that poops under the gardenia bush by the front door. I am on vacation . . .
The word sounds bleakly funny, but I brush past the urge to laugh because I know it will turn into a sob, and I try to remember more. What happened after I arrived? Was I in a car accident?
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to make sense of why I think of that first, but can recall nothing relevant, nothing connecting me to a car or a wreck. I came to see Simon and Melissa, Brad, Kristen, and Marcus. That, I’m sure of.
Marcus . . .
Did I see them? I feel sure I did but the details don’t come. I reach for them, and the effort to push through the haze to the truth of what happened next is almost physical, like straining against a heavy door in my mind.
It doesn’t open.
I set both feet and rise unsteadily. I can stand straight without straining my left arm unduly. I turn onto my side on the concrete bed with its thin mattress and take a long step with my right foot, feeling all the slack leave the chain around my left wrist as I lean away from the ring in the wall. I stretch out with my right hand, straining, reaching . . .
Nothing.
I am covering about six feet of the cell, and the cabinet on the wall—if that is what it is—will be at least a foot deep, maybe more, but if my echolocation guesstimate about the size of the cell is right, that leaves me still two feet short of reaching it. It may as well be a mile. I pull at the manacle, twisting my wrist back and forth, but the bracelet lodges at the base of my thumb and won’t move. I lean away from the wall till the pain becomes intolerable, then give up.
I sag back onto the bed, feeling far more weary than the action merits. I still can’t remember how I have wound up here and, coupled with my thin, ragged breathing, I wonder suddenly if I have been drugged.
Or assaulted.
There is still the smell of the blood, on my right hand particularly, though when I rub my fingers together, they feel dry and grainy, not slick. I smell them again, recoil at the scent, and begin feeling for injuries. The back of my head is throbbing and tender, but there’s no wetness:
a bump, not a cut.
My fingers go to my face. Then my arms. Then my legs and, with a little sob that forces its way out, up my thighs. I am wearing a dress, knee length, lowish at the neck and short sleeved. It is light and simple—cotton, I think. It feels familiar.
Mine. I know it. I can almost remember putting it on. In Crete. In a hotel? No. A house or . . . a place we had rented. A place Simon had rented.
I have a bra on underneath, also soft and comfortable, and panties, all of which feel intact. I feel no bruising, no tenderness anywhere except on the back of my head and a little ways above my right eye. A fall? Or a blow? Maybe both.
But no cuts and no sign of sexual violence.
The words come to me from a TV crime show. Sexual violence. It is one of those phrases whose bald factualness dodges a million horrors.
I have not been raped, or at least not in ways I can detect, though that is an uncomfortable proviso and points at the hole where my memory should be. I shy away from it again, the dark pit of unguessable depth, and cling instead to what I can deduce. Someone has put me here. I do not know why. If they wanted me dead, I would be. But I am not.
Which means they will come back.
I shift uneasily. My left arm already feels tired from the awkward angle I am holding it, and the wrist is chafed from the metal of the manacle. I tug at it till my hand protests but feel no give in the chain or the ring in the wall. Someone is coming back, and I am stuck here. Powerless.
And then there’s the blood, I remind myself.
Yes. I have blood on my hands, and my dress around the waist feels stiff with it too. I can’t be sure, not without light, but in my heart it makes sense, as if there is something I will eventually remember that will make sense of the gore on my hands and clothes. The dried clumps of it I feel in my hair.
I can’t remember how it got there.
I feel my body over again, rolling and adjusting to probe every inch of flesh. My head has been battered, and I must have a nasty black eye, but it is no ragged wound, no slash or puncture that would have bled like that.
Which can mean only one thing.
The blood I am caked in belongs to someone else.
The thought stops my breath for a moment. I was thinking that I have been . . . what? Trapped by a psychopath? Something like that.
But what if it isn’t that at all?
What if I have been walled up in here because of something else? Something I have done?
Chapter Four
It was a long drive. Over an hour to Rethymno, where we stayed last time, along the coast road that was sometimes labeled E75 and sometimes just 90, and then as much again as we cut in from the shore and up into the mountains, where the previously straight road became narrow and circuitous.
“Where are we going?” I asked, trying not to sound exhausted and apprehensive. It was good of Simon to have picked me up on top of covering the costs of the lodging. I had asked if I could give him anything for gas, but he waved the offer away with a smile, as if we were talking about sums so small, he could cover them with what he found in between his couch cushions. Maybe he could.
“You’re gonna love it,” said Simon. “It’s fantastic. Kind of in the middle of nowhere, but yeah. Fantastic. Perfect for us.”
I shifted in my leather seat.
“Us?” I said.
“All of us,” he qualified, giving me a look I couldn’t read because of the sunglasses. “The reunion.”
“Right,” I said. “Great.”
I was sitting with my carry-on in my lap, which felt ridiculous and uncomfortable. The car was huge, and I could have easily tossed it into the back seat or the trunk, but now I was belted in and had been there for so long that turning around and trying to get rid of it felt stupid for reasons I couldn’t explain. So I sat with the bag in my lap and my arms around it, like it was one of those under-seat float cushions the flight attendants had told us about “in case of a water landing.” The phrase had amused me in a bleak kind of way, like it was something the pilot might choose.
You know, copilot Bob, I think we’ll skip the runway and just put down in the ocean today, whaddya say?
Or maybe the bag in my lap was a shield.
Of course there was no reason to protect myself—even psychologically—from Simon. He was great. Gorgeous, friendly, generous. Flattering, even.
Apollo, god of the sun, the golden charioteer with his bow . . .
I took another of Chad’s long, steady
ing breaths and stared out the window at the craggy slopes with their clusters of dust-colored olive trees, ramshackle farm buildings, and bleached, crumbling churches. It was beautiful. I needed to get over my stupid, halting inadequacies and enjoy what I’d come here for.
“You heading straight back to Charlotte after our little get-together?” asked Simon, idly watching as an ancient man in worn and faded clothes, which might once have looked quite formal and must have been insanely hot, shooed his goats to the side of the road.
“I think so,” I said. “I had wondered about going to Turkey, but I have to fly again for work soon, so we’ll see.”
I wasn’t sure why I said it. It just came out. His suave composure, the luxurious car . . . I couldn’t help myself.
“Where to?”
“What?” I asked, already back pedaling.
“Where will you be flying for work?”
“Vegas,” I said. “One of our head offices is there. Not really my kind of place but . . .”
“You have got to be able to have fun in Vegas!” Simon exclaimed. “Something for everyone there, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Gets kind of old after a while, though.”
“I guess it could,” he said. “Where do you usually stay?”
“Oh, various places,” I said airily. “Work takes care of the arrangements.”
“Close to one of the casinos?”
“Always,” I said with a theatrical eye roll, as if nothing could be more tiresome.
“Which one?”
“What? Oh, what’s it called . . . the one with the pyramid.”
“Luxor,” said Simon.
“Right. Of course. Forget my head if it wasn’t attached.”
“The sky beam is something, isn’t it?”