It Ends With Her

by Brianna Labuskes

  He glanced around. “My buddy rented the place out for the next two weeks so that I wouldn’t have to find a place. Everyone who could took off extra time. They’ll leave soon, though. I guess I’ll get a hotel then.”

  “Okay. Thank you for the help. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Did I help?” The question was pitiful, not contentious. His voice had reverted to that of a little boy.

  “Yes,” Lucas drawled, and they all turned to the stairs.

  She paused, behind the guys, one foot on the first board, the other on the porch.

  “Oh, one more question, Jeremy.”

  He shifted toward her.

  “How often did you hit your girlfriend?”

  A mask dropped, quick and smooth as a guillotine over his face. The blankness there chilled her, but it was soon replaced by the perfect mix of confusion and anger.

  “What are you talking about? I loved Bess.”

  Loved.

  “I love Bess.” He must have seen something in her face. He’d pushed to his feet. “And you’re wasting your time if you think I’d do anything to hurt her.”

  A single tear escaped to trail through the stubble of his five o’clock shadow. “She’s the light of my life.”

  And, scene.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BESS

  July 7, 2018

  The tape took a small, delicate piece of skin along with it as Simon ripped it off her mouth.

  Bess used the energy from every cell in her body to let out an unholy scream that ricocheted off the closest walls and the ceiling but then seemed to fade into the nothingness of the room.

  He didn’t flinch, even though his face was mere inches from hers, close enough for her saliva to hit his chin.

  Those eyes—those brown eyes that were deep pools in the shadows—just stared, unblinking, letting her yell. But eventually they crinkled in amusement, just as the corners of his lips tipped up.

  She was gasping by the time her vocal cords gave out on her. Her throat was raw, and tears gathered along the lower rims of her eyes, threatening to spill out.

  “You can keep going if you want.” He said it as if he were letting a little kid take an extra turn on a pinball machine. She glared up at him. “It’s okay, really, my pet. No one will ever hear it.”

  She felt something she hadn’t felt in months. Years. It started in the right ventricle of her heart and spread like a live thing into her lungs. It crept up that back passage of her throat that stung when ocean water went down her nostrils. And buried itself right behind her eyes, burning away all the fear that had kept her in its clutches since she’d woken up in the strange room.

  Rage. It was rage.

  She had spent years locked up in a glass prison, and now that she was actually chained to the floor—all her resentment, all her anger, all her damaged self-worth and broken bones concentrated on the man in front of her.

  And she made a vow to herself as he waited for her to react. She would escape. And she would take him down in the process.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” she finally said, keeping her voice small, which wasn’t hard. It was rough from the screaming, anyway, and unpracticed from the hours she’d been drugged out.

  “There’s the drain, pet,” he said with a gesture to a hole covered by a metal grate. He laughed at the revulsion she couldn’t hide. “Change your mind, then?”

  He straightened and walked over to the girl in the shadows. She noticed he held a bottle of water in his hand, and she licked her dry, bleeding lip, wishing it was for her. But it wasn’t.

  “Ah, my love,” he crooned to the girl. She was behind one of the bulking shapes, so Bess couldn’t see her, but she was able to follow Simon’s trajectory. “It’s almost your special time.”

  Even Bess winced at the words. In no way could “special time” be a good thing in this circumstance.

  “Do you like your replacement?” As if the words weren’t already terrifying, he whispered them in a lover’s caress that ratcheted it up to horrifying. “She’s not as pretty as you. But she doesn’t have all these cuts on her face, either.”

  The tips of Bess’s fingers went numb at the words, but she refused to give in to the panic. Focus on the rage.

  There was a moment of silence where Bess strained to hear what was happening. Was the girl going to be killed right in front of her? There was a part of her—a part of her that made her cheeks burn in shame—that didn’t think she had enough energy to worry about someone else. The better part of her, the one she hoped made up the majority of her, knew she wouldn’t be able to just sit and let it happen. There certainly didn’t seem to be much she could do, but something was better than nothing. And that’s all she could hold on to.

  There was a scuff of boots against cement just as she was about to try screaming again. He walked by without glancing her way and headed up the stairs. The door closed, and she could hear heavy locks sliding into place.

  “He likes you.” The voice was quiet, hesitant, blank. There was no jealousy there or encouragement. Just the facts.

  “I’m not sure how to take that, to be honest,” Bess said.

  She heard the shrug in the girl’s voice when she responded. “I used to think he liked me, too.”

  The exchange was like sandpaper against an already-bleeding abrasion.

  “I’m Bess,” she tried, instead of responding. “What’s your name?”

  “He doesn’t like when I say it.”

  “Well, he’s not here right now,” Bess coaxed, keeping her voice gentle.

  Silence. Bess wondered if she’d lost her. Until finally, “A-Anna,” the girl stuttered out.

  “Anna. That’s very pretty. Nice to meet you, Anna.” Bess vowed to say the girl’s name as much as possible. She deserved to remember who she was.

  “Do you know how long you’ve been down here?” She needed information. And she needed to build up this girl’s confidence enough to get her to help Bess out. Strike that Superman pose, Anna. You can do it, girl.

  Silence again. Bess wondered if she was listening to make sure Simon wasn’t coming each time before she answered. That made Bess think the punishment for talking was perhaps something she should avoid. “April. I think.”

  Damn. That was a long time to be held captive by a psychopath.

  “That means you’ve been here about three months.”

  A little puff of air followed that. Anna hadn’t known. Bess bet time became an abstract construct when you lived in darkness.

  “Did he tell you his name was Simon?” Bess asked.

  She was getting used to the delayed answers now. “Y-yesss.”

  Simon the snake. Simon the sociopath.

  Now the important one. “Have you tried to escape?”

  “T-twice. I—I don’t know where we are. But we had to drive a long way to get here. He . . . he kept me drugged in the trunk of a car. It was wearing off. I think I’d been making noise. I can’t remember now.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “W-well, he stopped the car to give me more. But I heard someone else. I think he parked in the back of a lot somewhere, and someone surprised him. Simon shut the trunk door but not before I started yelling. You shouldn’t yell, you know.”

  Noted.

  “I think Simon killed him. He opened the trunk not long after, told me not to try that again, and punched me in the face. Then everything went black.”

  “And the second time?” Bess prompted when Anna didn’t seem inclined to continue.

  “It was a few days after I got here,” Anna continued. “I don’t think he was giving me . . .”

  “Giving you what, Anna?”

  “Drugs?” she said it like it was a question. “Whatever he uses to make everything fuzzy. My muscles don’t want to move when he gives it to me.”

  That was something to digest for later.

  “So this was before he started sedating you?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. It all b
lurs,” Anna said, her voice growing frustrated.

  “Shhh. It’s okay. How did you try to escape?”

  “It was stupid.”

  “Trying to live is not stupid, Anna,” Bess said, wanting to hug her. “Whatever you did, you tried.”

  “It wasn’t . . .” Anna trailed off. “It wasn’t enough.”

  “Did you try to get away?”

  “I ran. I ran up the stairs as fast as I could. I’m a fast runner.” There was a bit of pride there. Build on it. Hold on to it. Hold on to who you are. It was so easy to forget. “But he caught me. He said he always catches us.”

  “Us?” It came out sharper than she’d intended.

  “His girls.”

  Bess’s muscles contracted in an involuntary shiver at that.

  “Did you . . . Were any of the other girls here?” She forced herself to ask.

  There was the longest pause yet. “Not here. No.”

  “How do you know about them?”

  “He tells me about them. His girls.”

  Jesus.

  “When he caught you . . .” Bess needed to know the rest. Needed to know so she could plan.

  “That’s when he started giving me the drugs,” Anna said. That threw a wrench in her strategy.

  “Does he ever unlock these?” She jangled her foot so that Anna would know what she meant.

  “It seems like once a day for . . . necessities,” Anna said. “I get a shower sometimes. But that’s down here. And then when he takes you into the room, also.”

  “What happens in the room, Anna?” Bess didn’t want to know. She really, really didn’t want to know.

  But she wasn’t finding out. She’d lost Anna with the question. She waited enough time to realize she wasn’t just pausing like she had before.

  “Anna?” She tried the girl’s name a couple of times, but she was met with silence.

  So there was nothing left to do but sit in the dark and wonder when she would find out what happened in the room.

  The light under the door went dark at night, Bess realized, and she was able to keep herself oriented by watching it.

  Anna had stopped talking to her completely. She’d throw out the girl’s name every once in a while to see if she would respond, but she hadn’t yet.

  Simon had come to fetch Anna several times in the—from what Bess gathered—four days she’d been held in the basement. She’d caught sight of the girl’s strawberry-blonde hair around a sharp, sunken face that looked like it used to be round. She hadn’t even glanced at Bess. He’d taken her toward the back, where the small bathroom was, for a good amount of time.

  When she returned, there would be fresh blood on her clothes and a sick air of unwholesome excitement lingering around Simon. He’d rechain her to the floor out of Bess’s sight and then leave.

  Bess had tried to provoke him one time, yelling that he was a pathetic excuse for a man if he needed to keep women locked up in his basement.

  He’d paused midstride, one foot hovering above the first stair. Then, in one of the most chilling movements Bess had ever witnessed in real life, he’d turned with his whole body, horror-film style. He’d stopped before her, his head tilted, studying her. Then he’d knelt down so their eyes were level. The pupils almost blacked out the brown of his irises.

  And then, without warning, he’d slapped her so hard across her cheekbone she’d ended up sprawled on the floor. He’d removed the handcuffs that bound her arms days earlier, but the attack had been so sudden she hadn’t been able to catch herself before her head bounced on cement.

  “It’s not your time yet, pet,” he’d cooed as if nothing had happened. She held a shaking hand to the welt she knew had already bloomed, red and angry, across her pale skin. “You wouldn’t want to rush the game now, would you?”

  She’d held her tongue. She didn’t want him to know she was used to getting hit. It didn’t bother her as much as he probably thought it did. And, in that moment, she had realized something. Something that would help her escape.

  But now it was just her and Anna again. And the ever-imposing silence of darkness. She decided to fill it, even if Anna didn’t want to.

  “I’m a kindergarten teacher,” she said, deciding to start with the basics. “My boyfriend hates that I am, but I kind of love it. He thinks it’s a waste of my time and my degree . . . that I’m just babysitting other people’s kids. His words.”

  She gave Anna time to respond, but nothing came. “It’s not, though.” She told her about the kids at her school. The bad ones. The good ones. The charmers. The future nerds.

  Nothing.

  “I also run,” she said, hoping to spark a connection. “It lets me be free, you know? Away from any expectations. Disappointment. You don’t have to be perfect when you’re running, you know?”

  Strike two. She reached down deep. Emotional connection. They needed to work together. They needed to figure this out. Bess needed to jolt her out of her despair and dejection. Anna had given up all hope. She was a lamb being led to the slaughter. Literally.

  And then, all of a sudden, Bess knew what she needed to talk about.

  “The first time my boyfriend hit me, we were both so shocked, we started crying together,” she started. “We were in a stupid fight, and I remember every detail about it. But you know what? The fight itself doesn’t matter. Because it wasn’t about the fight.”

  “No.”

  It was the first word Anna had said since Bess had asked about the room. Bess shook her shoulders in a little victory shimmy.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking about? I’m not sitting here wondering when it all became so normal. Just so expected. One day it was just . . . that was the way it was, you know?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “It doesn’t feel like abuse even if you know it is. It feels like . . .”

  “Love.” Anna finished for her.

  Bess nodded even though Anna couldn’t see her. “Like love. Like a wildfire raging, uncontainable love. And then there are those bad times that shock you out of it, and you’re absolutely sure he’s going to kill you, and you call the cops, and you see it in their eyes. You see the judgment and the questions and the blame. And they ask you what you did to set him off. And they ask you if he actually hit you or just threatened to. Did he have a weapon? No, just his fists? Okay, then.”

  Her breathing had turned ragged, as she looked at the jagged edges of her nails that had broken off when she’d tried to pick at the locks on her chain biting into her palms. “And you see the girls who look at you when they see your black eye and silently wonder why you stay. Why I stay. Even if I ever get away from Jeremy, that’s all I’ll ever be asked. ‘Why did you stay so long?’ Fuck you, that’s why.”

  Bess heard a little gurgle that could have been laughter.

  “I was planning to leave, you know,” Bess said, and she heard the defensiveness in her voice even after her bravado a few seconds earlier.

  “Me too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d been collecting the change from around the house,” Anna said. “A few spare dollars every time I went to the store. He usually checked the receipts, but sometimes I could . . . distract him.”

  Bess felt a pang. Your replacement, the words echoed in her head.

  She realized she had let the conversation drop as she turned the similarities over. Looking for a way to use it to her advantage.

  Then, for the first time, Anna asked her a question. “What were you thinking about then?”

  Bess realized she’d never finished the thought. “I’m sitting here wondering if, when we escape, I’ll be strong enough to actually leave him. And I’m worried I’m not.”

  “That’s him talking,” Anna said, and for once Bess heard the girl she used to be in her voice. The one who collected pennies from the couch cushions so that she could leave a bad situation. The girl before the room happened. “You’re so strong.”

  “Well, you are, too, Anna,” Bess said
, her voice fierce. “And I’m going to need you to recognize that. You know why?”

  Bess was going to make her ask. No more of this silence crap.

  Anna gave in to her curiosity. “Why?”

  “Because you’re part of my plan to get us out of here.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CLARKE

  July 16, 2018

  “Sleep is for wussies, huh?” Sam set a large mug of tea at Clarke’s elbow before settling into the Adirondack next to her.

  “Sleep is for a night when there aren’t at least two young women’s lives on the line,” she said, before sipping from the cup.

  It was past midnight, and the brutal heat of the day had long given way to the relief the darkness brought. She was burrowed in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, with her feet curled under her. She’d been too comfortable and too focused on what she’d just recently discovered to seek such creature comforts as hydration. That was Sam. Always knowing what she needed, before she knew it herself.

  “I got news for ya, kid. There’s always gonna be a girl’s life on the line.”

  “Yeah, but this is different,” she said, closing the MacBook on her lap so she would stop staring at the screen. Even as she rubbed the heel of her palm over her dry, tired eyes until lights popped in the darkness, she knew the pain was worth it. She was onto something.

  She’d been going over every detail of the case since they’d returned to their little makeshift HQ after giving up hope of finding anything more at the cabin. Though she’d been frustrated at the lack of action, she’d been eager to get back to her files. The bastard’s voice had been echoing in her mind all day.

  Not the destination. The journey.

  She had to ask herself, What destination? What journey? The one they were on?

  The destination they’d been focused on was the dead girls. Maybe too focused, apparently. Logically, then, the “journey” would be the scavenger hunt. So what hadn’t they been noticing? It had to be the pictures; it was all they had to work with. But she’d studied the pictures. Sam had studied the pictures. The top brains at the FBI had studied the pictures. If there was something to have been found, it would have been found.