by Gwen Florio
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Lola.” Charlie poked his head around the bedroom door as though seeking permission to enter.
“Charlie.” Nothing in her tone granted it. She twisted to fasten her sports bra, pulled a singlet over her head, and wriggled into her running shorts. With no other way to ignore Charlie, she propped a heel on a chair and bent toward her knee, doing the stretches she usually ignored. Behind her, she heard the door close. Maybe he’d gone. Good, she thought. Let him sweat awhile longer.
“I was out of line this morning.” So he hadn’t left.
“No shit,” she said after the silence had stretched awhile. She switched legs and remembered why she didn’t do stretches. “Ow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Huh.” She abandoned the chair, stood on one leg, and reached behind and grabbed the other toe, pulling it toward her butt. She wobbled and nearly fell. Charlie caught her. She waited for him to let her go. He didn’t. He pulled her close and whispered the one phrase guaranteed to make her melt.
“I was wrong.”
“You sure as hell were.”
His arms tightened around her. He pressed his cheek against hers. “This thing is making us both crazy. Listen. It isn’t my case. It’s not your story. But we’re both wrapped up in it. Let’s say we figure it out together.”
She turned in his arms, inhaling the tinge of sage that clung to him. His hand slid under her shirt. “Those stretches. They’re not doing you any good. I know how to loosen you up.”
And so help her, he did.
The edges of the bluffs had gone blurred and violet, dissolving into the deeper blue of sky, when the girls set out on Valentine. Lola strode alongside, thinking about the iPad she’d ordered online for Charlie after he’d slipped smiling from the room, and trying not to think at all about the way the order had diminished her already-anemic checking account to the low three figures. The pony flattened his ears, tossed his head, and mouthed the bit, broadcasting his unhappiness at this late-breaking excursion. But Juliana and Margaret drummed sneakered heels so insistently against his generously padded sides that he finally broke into a jolting trot.
“Not too far!” Charlie called, behind them. “It’s getting dark.”
Lola lifted an arm and waved acknowledgment. “Geez, you two,” she said to the girls as she kept pace with them. She put a hand on Valentine’s neck, dancing away when he turned his head and snatched at her with his yellow teeth. “I’m not even breaking a sweat here.”
“Forget about him,” Margaret ordered. “We’re supposed to be looking for Bub.” She raised her voice. “Bub! Bub!”
Lola knew it helped Margaret to feel that she was taking action, however futile, to find Bub. But she felt obligated to inject a bit of reality into the evening. Besides, they only had about twenty minutes before true night fell. “Honey, don’t you think if he were this close, he’d have come back to the house?”
Margaret sat behind Juliana, one hand on her cousin’s shoulders, perfectly balanced, barely holding on. “Maybe he’s hurt. Maybe he’s lying somewhere and we can’t see him.”
If he was, Lola thought, then he’d have died of thirst that first day. She kept that thought to herself.
“Maybe,” Margaret continued, “his collar got caught on something. Maybe he’s stuck someplace, like back in those rocks.” She pointed toward a cleft in a low butte. “We should go look there.” She slid her arm around Juliana’s waist and kicked Valentine as hard as she could. He rocked into a canter.
Lola sprinted to keep up. “No way are you two going in there,” she called between gasps. “That pony’s too fat to fit. Let me check it out. You guys circle around while I’m in there. I’ll be back in five. And then we’re going home.” Already she could barely see the desert floor beneath her feet. If Bub was in there—and she was sure he wasn’t—it would be a challenge to see him. Not to mention rattlesnakes and spiders and whatever else might inhabit such a space.
She looked over her shoulder. The girls had put some distance between them, but she could see their heads turned back toward her. “You’re supposed to be looking for the dog, not at me.” They turned back and cantered away. Good, thought Lola. That way they wouldn’t realize just how cursory her check would be. The rocks loomed before her, releasing the day’s heat. But the opening, when she edged into it, was cool by virtue of having been in the shade all day. The sudden chill, the narrow walls, reminded her of the day in Antelope Canyon. A long shudder ran through her. Her breath came short. She inhaled, counting to five. Then exhaled. Another count of five. “Settle down,” she told herself. She raised her voice for the benefit of the girls. “Bub! Hey, Bub! You in here?”
“Yeah,” a low voice answered. “Right here.”
The blow to the back of her head cut off her scream before it ever left her throat.
THIRTY-EIGHT
This is the last thing.
That’s what I was promised. Along with, It buys us the final bit of time we need.
For what? I wanted to ask. But I knew better. I’d have thought that blowing up the house was the end game. Even though it didn’t quite work out the way it was supposed to. I guess I was wrong. Anyway, I wanted to say that there’s no us, not anymore. Even if I end up in a whiteman lockup. It’s what I deserve. But I need some time to figure out how to end this. And I have to admit that getting that reporter out of the way helps me as much as it helps the plan. When I saw her jogging off into the desert just as I got out of the car, I crept along after her, dodging behind the scrub, ducking into an opening in the rocks when she and the girls stopped to talk. I could hear their voices but couldn’t make out the words. And even though I knew they couldn’t hear me either, I held my own breath against the wheeze that threatened to escape. I’d hoped that once Shizhé’é divined my plan, he and the truck driver would loose their hold on me. The better I could function, the quicker I could put an end to things. But they only grabbed me tighter, bony fingers wrapped around my windpipe, the surprisingly corporeal weight of their ethereal bodies collapsing my chest. My lips fell open despite my clenched jaw. I sucked in air, the relief so sweet that it took me a moment to become aware of the receding hoofbeats—and the approaching footsteps. Oh, sweet, sweet stroke of luck. I whispered a swift apology for what I was about to do and drew my fist back.
The hardest thing was hearing the girls, their voices high and sharp with fear.
“Mom?”
“Auntie Lola?”
I tried to block them out as I dragged the inert form through the twists and turns of the narrow track through the rocks. Juliana probably knew that the split went all the way through the butte, but I doubted she would venture into it in the darkness, and by the time the adults were summoned, I’d be gone. I tightened my grip beneath the woman’s arms and gave a final jerk that freed us both from the confines of the rock. Then I bent my knees, stooped, and heaved mightily, balancing her across my shoulders, the way I might have done an injured sheep. Except that a sheep’s legs didn’t dangle nearly to the ground. And sheep generally froze with fear once you’d hoisted them, didn’t moan and stir the way she was beginning to do. Shit. I hurried back toward the house, being careful to step only on bare rock, watching the house light up, window by window, as I approached. The girls’ voices sounded again, this time followed by deeper adult replies. Valentine emerged into the spill of light from the front door; Naomi, Edgar, and Charlie stood silhouetted within it, concern evident in their rigid stances. The girls slid from the pony’s back and ran to them. A touching scene, if I hadn’t known the cause. If I hadn’t been the cause. I peered through the darkness, straining to see the lift of elbow, cellphone to ear. The woman stirred again, more forcefully this time. She was coming around. I readjusted her on my shoulders, tightened my grip. When I looked up, Naomi, Edgar, and Charlie were following the girls back out into the darkness.
I took my chance, moving as quickly as I could toward the car. I dumped the woman on the ground and stripped my T-shirt from my body, took the hem in my teeth, and tore it into strips. I tied her hands first. Her eyes flickered as I stuffed the gag into her mouth. I followed the gag with a blindfold before she got a glimpse of me. She kicked at me, bucking beneath me like a horse as I sat on her legs to tie her ankles. I considered. I took my last strip, ran it between the ties on her wrists and ankles, and pulled it tight. I couldn’t have her bouncing around like that, making noise, alerting someone to her presence.
By the time the panicked foursome arrived back at the house, she was in the trunk and I was in the kitchen, an expression of horror and words of shock and dismay at the ready, ignoring the mocking laughter of those two unseen beings.
THIRTY-NINE
Like he didn’t think she’d figure out who he was. Lola’s fury surpassed even the slicing pain in her head.
She’d faded in and out for a bit, but came to for good when the car started moving after an inexplicable delay. She jounced around in the trunk, hog-tied, unable to brace herself against the jolt from each fresh pothole. The car alone would have told her, its motor rattling and coughing, an amped-up version of its asthmatic driver. Oh, she’d heard that too, the way he’d labored for breath as he bound her, the same wheeze she’d heard beside her at the kitchen island on the nights he’d joined them for whatever perfect meal Naomi had prepared. She jerked against her bindings, but each fresh struggle only pulled them tighter, her back arching in torment. Yet the physical agony was nothing compared to the panicky sensation caused by the wad of cloth in her mouth. She drew in stale air, not enough, through her nose. Her lungs burned. Her heart slammed against them. Before she’d gone to Afghanistan, so many years earlier, she’d undergone training for reporters headed to war zones where kidnapping was a real possibility. Be the gray man, she remembered. Her instructor, a former member of the British special forces, hadn’t appreciated her question as to whether being a beige woman would do. She didn’t feel gray now. She felt scarlet with rage and terror. She rubbed the side of her face against the hot metal floor of the trunk, trying to loosen the blindfold as well as the tie that held the gag in place, succeeding only in removing a layer of skin from her cheek.
Lola vowed to herself that the minute she got free of the car and her bindings, she would do her damnedest to hurt or even kill her captor, with her bare hands if necessary. And she would have, clenching her fists in preparation as soon as the car stopped, had not the creak of the opening trunk been followed by the press of a cold steel circle against her temple.
She knew that feeling. She froze. Her captor worked one-handed to cut her bonds, freeing first her feet and then her hands and then, blessedly, the cloth holding the gag in place. Lola spat it out and gulped air. The gun stayed pressed to her head all the while. A hand grasped her arm, pulling her from the trunk. Lola clambered out and stood swaying. The gun dug deeper into her temple.
She awaited release from the blindfold. It didn’t come. She flexed her fingers. Maybe she could get the gun away. She would, she swore, shoot with a smile. “Sonofabitch,” she started to say.
“Shut up.” The voice was hoarse, muffled, as though her captor, too, wore a gag of some sort, or at least a bandana around the face in an unnecessary attempt to at disguise.
“Forget it,” she said. “I know who you are. You might as well take this damn blindfold off.”
The gun slid from her temple, traced her jawline, and stopped at the back of her neck. “Move. Now.”
Lola slid a foot forward, half expecting to find open air beneath it. Maybe she would be walked off a cliff, so that it would look as if she’d fallen to her death from some high place. But why leave on the blindfold, a sure sign that a fall was no accident? The ground remained firm beneath her feet. She took another step.
“Keep going.”
Her feet made slight scraping noises in the fine layer of sand atop the rock. She moved another few steps.
“Stop. Take hold of this.”
Her fingers were folded around a vertical railing of some sort. It was cold. The gun stayed firmly against her neck. Her other arm was guided toward a similar railing. A kick to her calf sent her forward.
“Start climbing.”
“What the—?”
The gun tapped against Lola’s skull. “No talking. Get going. Up.”
She lifted a foot, felt a rung. They were at the cliff houses, or someplace like it.
“No fucking way.” The words escaped before Lola could stop them. Under the best of circumstances—in daylight, surrounded by her family, and able to see—the ladder had been torture. She thought of the lizard that had skittered past that day. What if tarantulas lurked in the heights, coming out in the cool of night? She’d read that they were ground spiders, but what if that was wrong?
The gun poked at her again, this time in the soft flesh of her throat. “Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
A traitorous foot landed on the first rung. Her biceps bulged, pulling her upward. She achieved a few steps, then stopped. Cold steel lay briefly against her ankle. “Good job. Keep it up. I’m right behind you.”
Lola strained to see through the cloth binding her eyes. At least she couldn’t look down. Or up. Or anywhere. She climbed faster; or, at least, not as slowly.
“Better.” The voice floated past her ears. Lola couldn’t imagine the purpose of this nighttime climb. There was a gun. Why not just shoot her? The gears within her aching head whirred and clicked, the answer coming more slowly than she would have liked. When it arrived, it provided cold comfort. A shooting was a clear-cut murder. With ballistics, it would be entirely too easy to trace. Her brain spun back to its original fear. Maybe the blindfold would be yanked just before the shove from the cliff’s edge. She hesitated on the ladder.
“Keep moving!” The cold steel jabbed at her ankle, threatening to push her off balance. Lola picked up the pace again. If she was going to fall to her death, it wasn’t going to be from this damn ladder. At least, once they arrived at the top, she might have a chance to outwit her captor in some way—if indeed a faked fall was the plan. But even that didn’t make sense. What could possibly explain Lola’s presence at the ruins in the middle of the night? Why would she vanish on the girls? None of it made sense. Lola’s head pounded afresh. Her throat was dry and raw from the gag, and her wrists and ankles burned from where she’d pulled against her restraints. She slid her hand up the ladder and grabbed air. “God!” she yelled before regaining her grip. They’d come to the top sooner than she would have liked. She should have thought of some sort of plan before they got there, she thought as she half-crawled, half-fell onto the ledge. She pulled herself farther from the cliff edge and cautiously stood, backing away as she heard her captor leap nimbly onto the ledge.
“Stay there.”
An unnecessary command. Lola remembered the ledge as a curved place, with deadly drops on three sides. Obedience seemed advisable. She heard something drop to the ground, then rustling, clinking sounds. “Now what?” she muttered.
A metallic buzz answered her, a sound she usually associated with the shop table in their garage in Montana, where Charlie fiddled with various projects, most of them mysterious to Lola. It sounded like the little saw Charlie used to prune the larger tree branches, limbs—she recalled uneasily—about the girth of her own. Given how easily Charlie’s saw sliced through wood, she could only imagine the effect the buzzing implement might have on flesh and bone. Stories flashed through her head, real and fictional, of murder victims cut into manageable pieces, the better to dispose of them. She wondered if the rustling sounds had been black plastic garbage bags in which to dispose of her dismembered body.
“Wait,” she said.
“Shut up. I’m in a hurry. If I read the signals right, you’re afraid of heights.”
“No,” Lol
a said. “You read them wrong. I’m fine.” She thought of her halting progress up the ladder, her quavering voice, and tried to think of any other way they could be read. “You can’t blame me for being nervous. Under the circumstances.”
“Right. That’s why you’ve got your back plastered to the wall.”
Indeed, as the saw buzzed, Lola had inched backward across the ledge, somehow safely maneuvering herself against one of the cliff houses, its seven-hundred-year-old adobe bricks still giving off the heat of the day’s sun. She tried to make her objection more believable. “That’s because you’ve got that gun—and that saw. No way do I want to be near you.”
“I don’t have time for talk.” The voice still indistinct. She wasn’t corrected about the saw, which meant she’d been right. Dammit.
“It doesn’t matter. We’re almost done here.” The saw went back to work, buzzing louder as it bit into something.
Now, thought Lola. It would take only a few long, loping steps, a hard shove. She’d have to plant her hands hard, then pull back fast before she tumbled over, too. She’d be free. She took one step. Two. She imagined the yawning chasm and halted. Laughter rose above the sound of the saw. The noise stopped, replaced by a moment of silence, and then the clinking sounds again.
Action, however hesitant, hadn’t worked. Maybe words would. “The tourists. They’ll find me in the morning.” Even to herself, Lola’s protests had a flailing, desperate quality.
“No, they won’t. The site is closed tomorrow. Security precaution for all the historic sites, because of the bombings. Now shut up and listen.”
Lola’s ears strained. Something cracked, so loud she jumped back against the wall. A faraway crash followed. It sounded for all the world as though the ladder had fallen. Which meant she was trapped with her captor.