“Irving!” the woman screeched. “Irving!” Lights came on all over the house. A window slid open on the third floor and a man’s grumpy voice called, “What?”
Frank took off running in the direction of his car. He tore through the woods, tripping on tree roots and snagging his new camos on thorny limbs. He was almost at the road when a hand shot out from behind a tree and seized the back of his collar, bringing him up short.
The hand belonged to a giant clown with a parrot on his shoulder. Frank’s bladder nearly let go. The clown’s white face paint glowed night-vision chartreuse. A tiny bowler sat at a jaunty angle atop his frizzy wig. Above the waist he was regulation clown, complete with undersized tuxedo jacket and oversized polka-dotted bow tie. Below the waist he wore a plaid kilt.
The parrot screeched, “You’re grounded, buster!”
______
“THAT’S PERFECT.” Will read the name on their visitor’s driver’s license. “Francis Asa Narby. The husband. Utterly goddamn perfect.” He tossed the license onto the table next to the man’s wallet and car keys, his .38, now emptied of bullets, his helmet and goggles, and that preposterous knife.
Francis Asa Narby said, “I go by Frank.”
They were in the kitchen of the old house. Will and Fergus stood over Frank, who occupied one of the ladder-back dining chairs. Quint had been returned to his spacious cage in the foyer. Gabby had gone back to bed once the commotion had died down. Will had had a tougher time getting Cuba and Tom to stop playing with the night-vision goggles, but finally they, too, had trudged off to their rooms.
Yawning, Irving Hung tugged on the sleeve of his wife’s robe. “Will has this under control, honey.” He added a few words in Mandarin.
Strips of Scotch tape crisscrossed Ming-hua’s hair, protecting her iron-gray perm from the ravages of sleep. She maintained her death grip on the cleaver. “I call nine-one-one.”
“Not necessary,” Will said. “We know who he is.”
Her eyes narrowed in her doughy face. “This schmuck friend of yours?” Ming-hua’s accent was much more pronounced than her husband’s.
“Not exactly.” Fergus’s grin cracked his clown makeup. “But we’re about to get better acquainted, aren’t we, Frankie?”
“It’s Frank.” Lucy’s husband eyed Ming-hua’s cleaver warily. “Where’s my wife?”
Will addressed the old couple. “Take Irving back to bed, Ming-hua. He needs his beauty sleep.”
Ming-hua gave Frank one last malignant glare, then handed Fergus the cleaver and shuffled out of the room with her husband.
Fergus was scary to behold even without the weapon. His clown makeup was meticulous if a tad intense, with that painted rictus of a grin and the satanically arched eyebrows. His outfit was in the best clown tradition, at least until you got to the kilt. The whole package, including Fergus’s height and irrepressible Fergusy attitude, was, well, just plain scary.
No wonder the pediatric staff at the local hospital had asked him not to come around anymore, with his weird balloon animals and plinky ukulele and scolding parrot. Volunteer clowns are supposed to be members of an approved organization, they’d explained, like the Shriners. But that wasn’t the real reason. Simply put, Fergus scared the snot out of the grownups. Their young patients, on the other hand, got a kick out of him. Oh sure, there were always one or two who burst into tears at the sight of the big, grotesque clown, but most of the kids were bored silly in their hospital beds and welcomed the diversion. So Fergus ignored the nervous nurses and continued his good works. Tonight he and Quint had stayed late at the hospital, helping to distract a six-year-old hit-and-run victim. He’d just gotten home and was still in costume when Frank commenced his clumsy reconnaissance.
“Where is she?” Frank demanded again. “Where’s Lucy?”
Will leaned back against a cabinet; he folded his arms over his bare chest. “We don’t discuss ongoing jobs with outsiders. That includes spouses.”
“Well, this ‘ongoing job’ is my wife!” Frank stabbed a finger at his chest. “You kidnapped her, you son of a bitch. I want to make sure she’s okay. Once I get to see her, speak with her, then we can talk ransom.”
Will and Fergus exchanged a look.
“I expected to hear from you before now, but hey.” Frank tossed up his hands. “I’m here. I’ll pay. So let’s just do this thing and get it over with.”
Will scrubbed a hand over his bristly jaw, trying to decide whether this chucklehead was for real. He probably was. If anyone was playing games here, it was the little missus. “How did you find us, Frank? How did you know where she was?”
Frank hesitated. “I have my resources.”
“Cut the bullshit,” Will said. “We were followed.”
“By those two in the ski masks,” Fergus put in, but Will had already figured that out.
“How do you know Wesley and his pal?” Will asked Frank, whose shifty gaze prompted him to add, menacingly, “Do not lie to me.”
Frank sighed gustily. “Okay. What the hell. I hired them. Well, I hired Wesley. He brought along the other one.”
“Jay-sus!” Fergus the Clown advanced on Frank, who shrank back in his chair. “Your own wife. What did you tell them to do, leave her in a ditch somewhere? Haven’t you heard of divorce, you miserable piece o’ shite?”
Will’s expression never changed, even as he fought the urge to commandeer that cleaver and start carving Lucy’s significant other into eensy teensy pieces. Thank God I got to her first.
“It’s not like that,” Frank bleated. “She wants to divorce me. She kicked me out of the house. I can’t let her go through with it. I had to do something.”
Fergus settled a big hand on Frank’s shoulder. “Okay, now I’m going to hurt you.”
“I was just going to scare her,” Frank cried. “Make her think she’d been kidnapped.”
Fergus tightened his grip. Frank grimaced in pain. “Why would you do that, Frankie?”
Will answered for him. “So he could rescue her. Right, Frank? You wanted to show her what a brave, devoted fellow she’d be giving up if she left you.”
“It would’ve worked too,” Frank said, “if you guys hadn’t beaten me to it.”
“Do you really believe that?” Fergus gave the shoulder one last, punishing squeeze and released it.
“I haven’t known your wife that long,” Will said, “but I’d bet real money she’s not dense enough to fall for a lame stunt like that. Then again, she stayed married to you for . . . how long was it?”
“Twenty years.” Frank rubbed his shoulder. “And counting. We have a solid marriage. Lucy’s just feeling a little at loose ends. Empty-nest syndrome and all that. She just needs to know I still care.”
“Nothing says you’re special like being terrorized by strange armed men wearing ski masks,” Will said.
“Marriage is a sacred institution.” Frank straightened his spine. “There’s never been a divorce in the Narby family.”
Lucy had married Frank for the same reasons Tom’s mother had tried to corral Will. Of that, he had no doubt. They were the same reasons his own mother, his pediatric stepmother, and even his half sister, Judith, rehabilitated wild child that she was, had chosen their mates: a life of queenly sloth and a reserved parking space at the country club. Divorce would almost certainly impact Lucy’s standard of living, and not in a good way, no matter how brilliant her lawyer was. Perhaps the prospect of another three or four decades with Francis Asa Narby was simply more than she could stomach.
“I hate to break the news to you,” Will told Frank, “but you don’t know the little lady as well as you think you do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that she’s having a lot of fun at your expense,” Will said. “Ours too.”
“Being kidnapped is fun?” Frank sneered.
“It can be. When you’ve hired your own kidnapper.”
Frank stared at him in befuddlement. “Say again?�
�
“It’s what I do for a living,” Will said. “People pay me to abduct them and hold them prisoner, for anywhere from a few hours to a few days.”
“Wait.” Frank held up a hand. “You expect me to believe there are people who actually want to be tied up, dragged from their houses, held against their will?”
Will shrugged. “It takes all kinds. I don’t judge. I simply accommodate them. For a price.”
“Who would do something like that?”
“Someone who craves a little adventure without any real risk,” Will said. “It’s a safe thrill. Some folks just want to see how much mental and physical abuse they can take. I’ve got this fellow over there now, an aspiring poet who doesn’t think he’s suffered enough to write serious poetry. By the time we’re done with him, he’ll be Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Sometimes the client has a phobia he wants to confront. We get a lot of control freaks who want to abandon control for once in their life. That’s how your missus described herself.”
“Now I know you’re bullshitting me,” Frank said. “Lucy, a control freak?”
This man had no clue about his own wife. “She met with us last week. We discussed what kind of custom kidnapping experience she wanted. I watched her sign on the dotted line. Either she felt no need to inform her estranged husband about it or she’s getting off on the thought of you freaking out and running to the rescue. My money’s on the second thing.”
“No way.” Frank waved away the notion. “No frickin’ way would my Lucy go in for some kind of sick custom-kidnapping thing. You made all that up. She never asked to be snatched. If this isn’t about ransom, what do you want?”
Fergus said, “There’s only one thing to do, lad.”
“On your feet, Soldier.” Will hauled Lucy’s husband out of his chair.
______
LUCY HAD LONG ago lost feeling in her butt, but that was nothing compared to what was happening above her shoulders. She’d been tied to this hard chair for hours, forced to watch back-to-back episodes of The Powerpuff Girls. Will had rolled a TV/DVD unit into her black box of a room and popped in a long-running disc of her niece’s favorite show. Couldn’t they have just clubbed her to death and gotten it over with? This was worse than Britney and Christina, worse than the bulgur gruel. Even Josephine the mouse was preferable to hour after hour of the animated kiddie show.
It was the middle of the night. Lucy hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Her exhaustion, combined with the endless antics of Buttercup, Blossom, and Bubbles on the small screen, had fried her brain all nice and crisp. Thus when the door swung open and she saw Frank standing there looking like G.I. Joe with a hundred-dollar haircut, she assumed she’d begun hallucinating. Until he opened his mouth.
“Holy shit, Lucy, what’ve they done to you?”
She would have liked to tell him, but her mouth had again been sealed with duct tape, possibly to deprive the upside-down man next door of those blood-curdling screams he so relished.
Frank was accompanied by Will and a giant zombie clown wearing Fergus’s kilt. Maybe she was hallucinating. Will wore only thin pajama bottoms and a scowl. He clicked off the show and said, “Your knight in shining armor here seems to be suffering under a misapprehension, Lucy. He thinks you’ve been abducted against your will. You’re going to set him straight.”
Excuse me? She said it with her eyes.
“I’m in no mood for more of your nonsense,” Will warned. “Just tell him you hired me and that everything’s hunky-dory.” He ripped the tape off her mouth.
“Help me, Frank!” she cried. “Pay them whatever they want. Just get me out of here.”
Fergus let out a big, jolly clown laugh.
Will cursed. He leaned down and got in her face. “Very funny, Lucy. Frank thinks you were really kidnapped. You understand? You’ve had your fun, we’re all tickled as hell. Now let your husband in on the joke.”
At least Lucy now knew that Frank had nothing to do with her abduction. “I don’t know what he’s talking about, Frank. Please,” she beseeched him. “I can’t take any more. Do whatever you have to, but get me out of here!”
“What have you done to my wife?” Frank demanded.
Fergus turned to Will. “Maybe it’s time to call this one quits.”
“No.” Will’s expression was mulish. “Only she can call it quits before the four days are up. I know you remember the signals,” he told Lucy.
Frank said, “Signals?”
“A ‘safe word,’” Fergus explained. “A sort of password we all agreed to ahead of time. She says that word and we stop whatever we’re currently doing, or even let her go if that’s what she wants.”
Will said, “There’s also a gesture she can make even if she’s gagged and tied up. Lucy knows how to put an end to all this. She came up with the signals herself when we met with her last week. You don’t think your wife’s a control freak?” He glowered at her. “Who do you think is pulling the strings right now?”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked Will. “We’ll give you money. We won’t go to the police, I swear.”
“Speakin’ of which.” Fergus jerked his head toward Frank. “What do we do with this fella? If we let him walk out of here thinking his wife’s been honest-to-God kidnapped, the cops’ll be breaking down our door before sunup.”
“I know.” Will looked thoroughly disgusted.
“This one was fun,” Fergus said, “but it’s gotten a wee bit messy. Let her go.”
“Not a chance. The lady paid for four days of abuse and I aim to see she gets her money’s worth.” Will stared down at Lucy. “Unless she decides to play by the rules and signal me to stop.”
“I don’t know about any damn signals.” She strained against her bindings. “You’re sick. Demented. He’s Ricky Baines,” she informed Frank. “Did you know that?”
Frank frowned in bafflement. “Who?”
“The child star? Didn’t you watch In No Time? He calls himself Will, but it’s really him. It’s Ricky Baines. Oh yeah. Ask him.”
“Calm down, Lucy,” Frank said. “This is a bad time to get hysterical.”
Let your husband in on the joke, Will had said. If anyone was enjoying a joke here, it sure as hell wasn’t her.
A joke. Lucy’s head snapped up. A joke! Of course!
Will claimed Lucy had met with him last week. There was only one person who could have pulled that one off. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner?
Because their practical jokes had never risen to these outrageous heights before, that was why.
“I know what’s going on!” she cried. “I’ve figured it out.”
“So happy to hear it,” Will said, even as he started to replace the strip of duct tape over her mouth.
“No! Wait!” She tried to twist away, but his long fingers held her head like a vise. “The woman who hired you. It was—” The rest was lost in grunts from behind the tape.
—my twin sister, Ethel.
Chapter 8
One Week Earlier
ETHEL VANDERMEER WATCHED the big Irish fellow set up a camcorder on a tripod. “What’s that for?” she asked his boss.
“We always record the initial interview on videotape.” Will Kitchen settled in a leather-upholstered armchair facing her and opened his spiral notebook to a blank page. “It’s helpful in preventing misunderstandings.”
“Otherwise known as lawsuits.”
He tipped his head to confirm her interpretation. “Between the video and the detailed, signed contract, the client can’t come back later and claim we did something he, or she, didn’t ask for.”
“Covering your ass,” Ethel said. “Makes sense in your business, I suppose.”
Will glanced around Lucy’s greatroom, a high-ceilinged space done up in earth tones with navy and sage accents. “Nice place you have here, Mrs. Narby.”
“Please.” Ethel smiled. “Call me Lucy.” The décor in this room, as in the five thousand square feet of house surroundin
g it, was refined yet comfortable, and boring as hell. Typical of her sister’s decorating style, not to mention her taste in husbands.
It was time to shake up Lucy’s world.
Ethel knew they wouldn’t be interrupted. Her brother-in-law, Frank, had moved to an apartment in Queens weeks ago, her nephew John was in the middle of his second semester at Cornell, and her sister Lucy would be out of the house most of the day. Lucy had driven to a bookstore in New Jersey to sign copies of her latest children’s mystery, Johnny Sherlock and the Cracked Clock. She wouldn’t be back until four at the earliest. That gave Ethel more than enough time to let herself into the house with the keys and alarm code Lucy had given her in case of emergency and to meet here with Will Kitchen and his assistant, Fergus Dowd.
Ethel had chosen a typical Lucy outfit: dark red blouse, cropped khaki slacks, and cordovan flats. That morning she’d let her hairdresser cut her hair in long layers just past the shoulder, the way Lucy wore it. She also got a dye job to cover her highlights and restore her natural dark brown color. Drastic measures, to be sure, but it would be worth it. Ethel only wished she could see the look on Lucy’s face when it happened.
The twins had traded practical jokes their entire lives. It had started when they were three and little Ethel decided it would be great fun to hide Lucy’s favorite baby doll. Lucy retaliated by hiding Ethel’s security blanket—in the compost pile. As time passed, the girls’ pranks became more sophisticated: gluing dishes to the table, filling shoes with shaving cream. By the time they were teenagers, it was everything from plastic wrap stretched over the toilet bowl to red Kool-Aid powder in the shower head to a birthday cake with chopped-liver frosting.
As adults, they strove to outdo each other. When Ethel poured a bottle of detergent in Lucy’s toilet tank, Lucy filled Ethel’s car with Styrofoam peanuts. Ethel got her revenge by hiding a whole bluefish under a wheel cover of Lucy’s car—in August—whereupon Lucy had Ethel’s bedroom furniture relocated to the roof of her garage. During the holiday shopping season last winter, Ethel sewed department-store antitheft strips into the lining of Lucy’s coat. Lucy’s response was to plant a metal cutout of a gun in Ethel’s carryon baggage. The security staff at JFK were not amused.
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