I Know Where She Is: a breathtaking thriller that will have you hooked from the first page

by S. B. Caves

  Francine grabbed the TV remote and turned it on. She pressed ‘play’ on a separate remote and the screen came to life. It showed a room in the same house as the first video. Glenn was standing over a girl who was chained face down on a bed. He was hammering her buttocks with a meat tenderiser. The girl’s screams were muffled by a ball gag, but the sheer frantic terror she felt resonated through the room. The camera zoomed in on her bloody, savaged cheeks, then changed its drunken focus to Glenn’s flaccid penis. Glenn was speaking in the video but the music was too loud and it was impossible to make out what was being said. But the sentiment came through. He was laughing, enjoying himself.

  He tilted his head to watch the TV. There was not one twitch of fear in his face; instead, he regarded the screen as though it were a piece of art at a museum. He sighed and said, ‘You’ll have to forgive me. I took my glasses off and left them in the car. I’m not very good without them.’

  Francine snatched Cindy’s cell phone off the table and threw it to him. ‘I want you to call them.’

  ‘Call who?’

  ‘Whoever those girls belong to. Call them up and say you want a girl by the name of Melody delivered here.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’ He turned on the sofa to face her. ‘There’s just no way.’

  Francine had anticipated this. She placed the gun against Cindy’s head. A great gust of breath tumbled out of the woman’s mouth and she wheezed, sucking in oxygen. ‘Glenn! Do as she says! She’s fucking crazy.’

  ‘Oh I don’t think she is,’ Glenn said smoothly, defiantly. ‘I think she’s rational. I think we can definitely work something out, but this particular request is simply off the table.’

  ‘Call them. Last chance.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be doing that,’ Glenn said.

  On the TV, the cameraman swept across to Cindy, who stood naked in the corner of the torture room holding a cocktail in her hand. When she saw the camera on her, she smiled and waved, even did a little drunken jig. She was giggling, her white teeth standing out in the candlelit bedroom, while just off to her right Glenn was hammering some small, anonymous girl as though beating a hunk of beef.

  Francine looked down into Cindy’s face. Cindy’s lips worked silently, trying to find the right words. The only thing she came up with was, ‘Please.’

  She switched her focus to Glenn and made sure that he was looking directly into her eyes. He shrugged, glanced across at the TV, then back. ‘Whatever you do from this moment on will simply bring you misery. You could kill me, which I think you plan on doing, but then you’d be arrested and spend the rest of your life in prison.’

  ‘You’re going to pick up that phone and you’re going to call your people. You are going to ask for a girl called Melody to be brought here. You’re going to insist on it.’

  Glenn began to laugh. It wasn’t mocking, but rather as though he found the notion genuinely funny. ‘No, that won’t work. Do I have your permission to fix a drink? I’m very tired from the trip over here, and all this excitement has drained me somewhat.’

  Now it was Francine’s turn to laugh. ‘Do you really think I won’t kill you?’

  He stroked his chin. ‘I think you will kill me either way.’ He seemed to contemplate this before adding, ‘So right now, the way I see it, I’m dead no matter what I do.’

  ‘Have it your way.’ She stood up and held the gun to his head.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ He put his hands up, cringing away. ‘All right, all right. Let’s just hold on a second and work this out, shall we?’

  ‘There’s nothing to work out. You make the call.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll make the call, as long as you understand what will happen once I do. I want you to fully grasp the ramifications, because you obviously have no idea what you’re dealing with here.’

  ‘I’m going to count to three …’

  ‘Okay, you don’t need to threaten me any more, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Put the phone on speaker,’ Francine ordered, as Glenn tapped the number in. The dial tone droned for a few seconds before it was answered.

  ‘Joseph? How are you, old boy?’

  ‘Sorry, who is this?’ Joseph returned sharply.

  ‘It’s Glenn, Glenn Schilling.’

  ‘Glenn, I’m a little busy at the moment, so you’ll have to make it quick.’

  ‘Sure thing. I’m up at the house in Little Peace and was wondering if there was any chance at all that I might be able to make an order.’

  There was a beat of silence. ‘Your next scheduled gathering isn’t until next week.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I was hoping that on this occasion you might be able to make an exception. My wife and I are bored and thought we could have something to play with for a couple of days.’

  ‘Glenn, now is really not a good time for this call. You know the agenda.’

  ‘I know. I thought it was a long shot. Would it make a difference if I were to pay double, just for one girl, of course?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘So there’s absolutely no way I can have a girl sent here? Not even if I pay triple?’

  Another beat of silence. Joseph exhaled, sounding irritated. ‘I’m low on staff today. No deliveries are going to be made until your next gathering. Look, I have to go.’

  The line went dead. Glenn looked up at Francine and shrugged. ‘I tried.’

  ‘Fine. If they won’t bring her here, then you’re going to have to take me there.’

  Glenn opened his mouth to object.

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know where the house is either, because your bitch wife already told me you do.’

  He looked over at Cindy with an expression of disgust. ‘Fine. Fine, fine, fine.’

  Francine grabbed her bag and waved him towards the door, ignoring a pathetic ‘Please!’ from Cindy as they left. Outside, she watched him totter over to the passenger side of the car.

  ‘You’re driving,’ she said.

  ‘But I can’t,’ he said, blinking at her.

  ‘You can, and you will.’

  He looked down at the road winding around the cliff. ‘I really don’t think that’s a good idea. My eyesight is terrible. It was still light out when I made my way over, but there’s no way I can get the car down this road in the dark.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I’m not, I promise you. Why don’t you tie me up? I can direct you. I’m sure you’re a much more capable driver than me, even for a woman.’ He cracked a smile, then shook his head. ‘I apologise. I make inappropriate jokes when I’m nervous.’

  Francine watched him get into the passenger side, then went around to the driver’s seat. She felt in her bag and removed the cable ties. She very nearly put the gun on the dashboard to tie his wrists but thought better of it. He might look nothing more than a frail old man, but she was sure he would find the strength from somewhere if an opportunity presented itself.

  ‘Give me your hands,’ she said, then awkwardly bound them with the ties.

  ‘Ooh, that’s a little tight.’

  She ignored him, holding his wrists to the interior door handle and looping another cable tie around that.

  She started the engine and set off down the narrow road that wound round the cliff. She had the full beams on, the light carving a path through the darkness. It was a treacherous descent, the car forced to take up the majority of the road, and she was thankful that she had not made Glenn drive.

  When she reached the bottom, she asked him which way to go.

  ‘Carry on in this direction and you’ll make it to the junction joining the highway. From there you’ll want to take a left.’

  She followed his instructions. ‘How far away are we?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Difficult to say really. You’ll want to go down the freeway until we come to a turning called Stack’s Point – it shouldn’t take much longer than an hour to get there. Af
ter that, the journey is a bit trickier, but I’d say we’ll reach the grounds in under two hours.’

  Francine’s pulse began racing. She would be reunited with her daughter in two hours. There was nothing that could derail her now. She pressed her foot harder on the gas, the needle pushing over 100, the night whizzing by in a blur.

  With her mind wandering, she forced herself to concentrate on her driving. It was easy to indulge in thoughts of a reunion, but if she were to clip a pothole or skid on these wet roads and blow a tyre out, this whole thing could come to a screeching halt. So far, everything had worked out for her. It was easy to equate her success with something as trivial as luck, but she thought maybe it was a little more than that. She was reclaiming what was rightfully hers. She was owed justice. At that moment, she felt invincible, as though no force on the planet could step in her way. God himself could chuck a lightning bolt out of the sky and she would take it and laugh back up at him.

  She was going to get her baby back.

  25

  It had been over twenty-four hours since she’d made her escape, and Autumn was beginning to hallucinate. She was running a high temperature – she could no longer even feel the cold –and was considerably sleep-deprived. Her head was fuzzy and painful with every slight movement; her skull like a package containing something fragile that had broken.

  She inched up the hill to get a better view, clambering along using the trees for support, squinting to focus her eyes. She had to be hallucinating; there was no other explanation for it. What she saw forced her to her knees. She held her aching head in her hands and began to rock back and forth.

  She had somehow navigated back to the house.

  No, it couldn’t be. She clawed at the mud. She didn’t even realise that she was chanting, babbling incoherently, the world slowly sliding away from her.

  The sickness had taken her; that was all it was. She looked out through her matted hair; could see the convoy of cars and the guards walking around. ‘It’s not real. Not real. No, none of this is real. No, no, no, no, no. Just rest. Please just let me rest a second. Please God, will you just let me rest?’

  She scrunched her eyes closed and tried to remember how she had got here. Just before sunset, when she’d discovered the stream, she had been presented with a dilemma. Did she follow the flow of the water or go against it? There was no way to know for sure, but she had assumed that if she followed the flow, it would lead somewhere. But perhaps her perception had been skewed.

  Mad with thirst, the first thing she had done was gulp down mouthfuls of the bitter, swampy water. After that, she had struck gold again and discovered a wild tangle of blackberries that, although sour, gave her just enough of what she needed to put one foot in front of the other. An hour later, however, her stomach was twisted in knots and she’d had to squat and empty her bowels. She hoped the berries weren’t poisonous.

  Now she shuffled over to a tree at the crest of the hill, pulled her knees into her chest and watched the house. Through her fever, the scene unravelled like a hazy home movie, some distant fragment of a dream that lost its lucidity the more she chased it.

  ‘Shh, it’s okay,’ she told herself, rocking with her eyes closed. ‘Everything’s okay now.’ She tasted blood, thought she was imagining it and then saw the red droplets dotting her knee. Her fingers reached up to her mouth and she discovered that she’d clamped her lip between her teeth. ‘Please God, please hear me. Please … help me, God.’

  She snapped out of her stupor at the sound of a car engine drifting through the forest behind her. She jerked her head around, feeling the broken glass shift in her skull, but couldn’t see any oncoming lights. It was entirely likely that she’d imagined the noise, especially if she truly was hallucinating this whole episode. But now reality was pawing at her with cold, clammy hands, stripping away this convenient fantasy she’d built as a defence mechanism. No, she wasn’t hallucinating. She had followed the stream in the wrong direction, linked back up to the path and trekked straight to the one place she’d fought to escape from.

  There was no God. She was sure of that now.

  ‘I’m so stupid. I’m so fucking stupid!’ As she pounded her head with clenched fists, she caught sight of headlights in the distance. Not only had she looped all the way round back to the house, but she was directly in the path of any cars coming through the forest.

  But she was not ready to give up just yet.

  * * *

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ Glenn said, clearing his throat.

  ‘Yes,’ Francine replied. ‘I do mind.’

  ‘Given the circumstances, I’m not very eager to argue with you, but I think it might be prudent to find out what it is you have planned.’

  Francine wasn’t listening; all her attention was dedicated to looking out for the sign that would take them off the road.

  ‘I’m assuming your daughter is at the house. What did you say her name was? Meg?’ When Francine still didn’t reply, he continued unprompted. ‘It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference either way, I suppose. You plan to take her back, don’t you?’

  ‘I am going to take her back. There’s no two ways about it.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but your ambition is at least admirable, albeit completely and utterly insane. You won’t get within walking distance of the compound. They have guards and dogs and guns. The only thing you will achieve is ensuring us a grisly death. They’ll apprehend and torture us and then feed us to the pigs. I’ve seen them do it before.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘That would be a merciful way to go, given our options.’

  ‘You deserve it,’ Francine said. ‘You deserve worse.’

  ‘Do I? Well, perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘You’ve raped and tortured children, you sick fucking bastard. You’ll get what you’re owed. Take my word for it.’

  Glenn inhaled, gathering his thoughts. ‘We’re both guilty of different deeds, that is true. But if we’re going to judge one another, we should get all our grievances out in the open.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  ‘Or what? You’ll pull over and shoot me? Go ahead,’ he said, the words dipped in amusement. ‘I would welcome a quick death. Believe me when I tell you it’s a lot less than I can expect once you drive up to the house.’

  ‘You’re a boring old man,’ Francine said, shaking her head.

  ‘I can’t deny that, I suppose.’ He struggled to twist around in the seat so that he could face her. ‘Celebrities are boring. We’re a bunch of pampered, unhappy, self-important fools. That’s why we sometimes look for other things to help make life that bit more exciting.’

  ‘Is that how you see it, Glenn? You really don’t have a conscience at all, do you? You’re just a sick twisted fuck.’

  ‘Oh, spare me the Mother Teresa routine, would you? I can’t bear to listen to your agonised diatribe, dramatic though it may be.’

  ‘You really are a monster, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, a monster, a sick, twisted fuck, a boring old man, all of the above. Keep the insults coming if it makes you feel any better.’ He gave a dismissive tut. ‘You can’t possibly fathom my world. How could you? What do you do for a living anyway? Are you a cleaner? Work in a supermarket, something like that? I make more money than I could ever spend. I’ve slept with the most beautiful women in the world. I can afford anything there is to buy. And you know something? It’s tedious. None of it means anything.’ He inspected his manicured fingernails. ‘I don’t believe there is a God, young lady. I think that when you die, that’s it, the show’s over. My philosophy is to try and find as much fun as I can while I’m still here. That’s all I do, my dear. There is nothing personal in it.’

  Francine took her eyes off the road and glared at him. ‘I hope you’re right about the torture. That’s the only thing that’s helping at the moment, knowing that you will leave this world screaming and terrified.’

  He sighed. ‘Quite the piece of work, ar
en’t you? And I must say, as insane as you clearly are, it strikes me as somewhat odd that you could be so … hypocritical. Here you are acting like some avenging angel out to rescue your daughter when it was you who put her in this position in the first place.’

  Francine’s nails dug into the rubber of the steering wheel.

  ‘How did they take her? Weren’t you watching? You can’t come crying about it now, when the damage has already been done.’

  The weathered sign for Stack’s Point was partially shrouded by tree branches, but she spotted it just in time for the turning. She pulled off the highway and down the solid darkness of the featureless road. The car began to bounce and rumble as the terrain changed beneath the tyres.

  ‘You should first make peace with the fact that you were a terrible parent,’ Glenn continued. ‘Perhaps if you had kept a better watch on your daughter, you could’ve saved yourself years of torment. Still, we live and learn, don’t we? I don’t suppose you will make the same mistake again. Do you have other children?’

  ‘You’re trying to throw me off. It’s not working.’

  ‘Throw you off? Didn’t I just tell you two minutes ago to shoot me? I couldn’t care less, my dear. I’m tied up. I’ve made no attempt to escape. What does it matter to me?’

  Francine swerved and almost pulled the car off the trail and down a hill. She wrestled the wheel, straightened out and continued to creep along. ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘Stick to the path, that’s all.’

  ‘How deep in do we need to go?’

  ‘It’ll be a little while yet. Should give you plenty of time to think.’

  ‘Think about what?’

  ‘About turning back.’ He sighed again and shook his head. ‘You don’t really want to do this, I can tell. You’re acting out of some misguided sense of pride. You think that if you make a stand now, it will be all right, that it will count for something. This is all to help you sleep at night, isn’t it? But you don’t want to die.’