A Bookmarked Death

by Judi Culbertson

  “Do you think he still has his phone?” What if Will had ditched it the way Elisa did hers?

  “Probably. Smartphones are expensive, you don’t just toss them away.” Frank reached for his desk phone and turned it around to me. “Why don’t you call his number?”

  I didn’t pick up the receiver. “Won’t the ID come up as the police? That would spook him.” I reached into my bag and brought out my own phone, then turned it on.

  Frank dictated the number.

  I pressed it in and sat with my eyes closed, waiting for it to ring. My whole life depended on something as tenuous as whether a phone was answered. If the gods were ever with me, if I had been granted just one more answered prayer, I prayed it would be now.

  “Hola!” The voice was good-­natured, slightly ironic.

  “Will? Will Crosley?”

  “Who is this?”

  “You don’t really know me, I’m Delhi Laine. I’m looking for Elisa—­”

  His phone clicked off.

  I looked at Frank, feeling as if the room were dissolving around me. “He hung up! I mentioned Elisa and he hung up. Isn’t there any way to find where he is?”

  “It will take a few hours.”

  “We don’t have a few hours!” I started to press redial, then stopped. “Maybe I should text him. He’ll have to read that.”

  Frank nodded, giving nothing away.

  I pressed redial but instead of letting the phone ring, I keyed in letters: Tell Elisa Hannah’s in trouble. I added my cell number, then sent the message.

  “If she cares about Hannah at all, she’ll call me,” I said. “Even if she’s not willing to do anything, she’ll want to know what happened. They’ve been inseparable since they met. Much closer than my twin and I ever were.”

  “You’re a twin?”

  How could he not know that about me? But maybe he did. Maybe he was just filling in the time until we heard something back.

  “You think he knows how to reach Elisa?” Frank asked.

  “I hope so! He’s her brother. She said he sometimes calls her for money, so he has the number.”

  Then I remembered her cell phone lying abandoned on a dresser in Boston and wanted to weep.

  Chapter Thirty

  AFTER ANOTHER EXCRUCIATING minute there was a ding, indicating a text message. I looked down at the phone still in my hand:

  What kind of trouble?

  “He wants to know what kind of trouble,” I said to Frank. “I don’t know what to say!”

  “Tell him you have to talk to Elisa.”

  “But what if—­”

  “We’re not going to get anywhere otherwise.” He was firm, years of experience behind the statement.

  “Okay.” I sat back in my chair. I need to talk to Elisa, I wrote.

  Time passed, then another ding. This a trap?

  I typed, my fingers falling over each other. No trap. I need her help. Pls call me!

  And then my phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “You’re Elisa’s real mom?”

  “Yes.” My throat choked up immediately.

  “Okay. This is Will. What’s happening?” His voice was crisp, unaccented. But he’d had the same privileged upbringing as my daughter.

  “Someone—­maybe the Crosleys—­kidnapped my daughter Hannah. Elisa’s twin sister. They want to trade her for Elisa or they say they’ll kill Hannah.” Stay strong. “And I know they will.” If it’s the Crosleys they’ll want to make me suffer for the rest of my life.

  “Hang on.” Silence.

  Finally, “Delhi?”

  “Elisa? Is that you?”

  “This is the last thing I wanted to happen! I thought they’d go after you. I mean, I didn’t want that, but I made sure not to call you. And I knew Will would help me. What have they done to Hannah?”

  “Nothing yet. But someone went up to Cornell Monday morning and told her you were in trouble and had to see her. So she went with them. She wasn’t answering her phone until last night, I finally reached her. She said she was on a boat.”

  “The Beautiful Past, probably. Oh, God, I should have warned her more! I should have known.”

  “They want to trade her for you.” There was nothing to do but say it flat-­out.

  “To trade—­you mean they’ll let her go if I go with them? But I can’t! Oh, God, this is all my fault. She only wanted to help me. Where are you right now? Are you—­it doesn’t matter, they’re probably watching you wherever you are.”

  “Who? Who is?”

  “You don’t know them. Are you home?”

  “No, I’m at the police station. They know all about it. Even if we set up a trade, it would only be for a few minutes. The police would be right there to arrest them.”

  “You’d need a lot of police,” she said darkly.

  “They have a lot of police.” I looked to Frank for verification and he nodded.

  “Elisa, are your parents alive?”

  “No, but it’s complicated. But I’ll have to do this. For Hannah. She’s the only innocent one.”

  “The police will be there to protect you,” I promised.

  “Okay. Call me back when you know more.”

  And she clicked off.

  I lowered the phone. “She’ll do it. She said she’d do it.” I closed my eyes, but opened them fast. “That’s what she says now. But—­we have to set it up now.”

  Feeling desperate, I pressed in Hannah’s number and listened to the ringing. Her cheerful voice finally telling me to leave a message was unbearable.

  “Hani? I don’t know if you’ll get this, but if you do, I’ve found Elisa. We’ll get you home soon.” I could do nothing about the tears flooding my eyes.

  Frank stretched out his hand and held my wrist. “They said they’d contact you, didn’t they? Doing this is in their own interests. Go home and wait.”

  “No!” I wasn’t going to move. How could I leave his office for a world too dangerous to live in? “What if they think it will take longer and don’t call? What if she changes her mind?”

  “Delhi.” His smile was warm. A friend. “They want what you want. When they know you have Elisa, they won’t hurt Hannah. We’ll get her back safely.”

  “Really? You think so really?”

  “I do. I’ll speak to Carew, bring her up to speed.”

  “Okay. I’ll go home.” I pushed out of the chair and headed for the door, startled when I passed the wall clock and saw it was not even 9 a.m. This day had barely begun. Sometimes at home when I got up early and began listing books, I was pleased to check the time and see it was only eight or nine, with hours still ahead of me. Not today.

  The parking lot was on a rise from the brick precinct buildings. I climbed the steps between banks of grass, grass that was still fringed and as delicate as the growth on a Chia Pet head. Elisa had said they were watching me and I examined the cars I passed. But I saw only one patrolman in standard navy blue walking toward the building. Crazy ideas swamped me. If I had a megaphone, I could shout the news that I had Elisa and I was ready to trade. If I had notepaper, I could leave a message under every windshield wiper of every car parked here: I have Elisa. Call me!

  When I reached my van I waited by the driver’s side door in case anyone wanted to approach me.

  Nothing.

  Then, as I was unlocking the door, my phone rang.

  Colin wondering why he had not heard from me? But when I retrieved the phone from the bottom of my bag and looked down the screen showed “Private Caller.”

  My heart began jumping like a child promised ice cream. “Hello?”

  “You have the girl?” It was the voice from Hannah’s phone last night.

  “Yes! I mean, she says she’ll come.”

  “Where is she?”r />
  Right. Of course I’m going to tell you so you can go get her first. “How is Hannah?”

  If you’ve done anything to her. . .

  “Not very cooperative. But she’s okay.”

  “Are you watching me?”

  He laughed. “You’ll never know, will you? Do you know Fire Island?”

  “A little. What part?”

  “Take the 3:30 ferry from West Street in Patchogue to Watch Hill. Just you and Elisa. Don’t bring your police escort. Don’t ask her any more questions. You won’t live to regret it if you do.”

  Gangster talk. But the command about not asking questions jarred me. Had he somehow heard our conversation? Could you tap an iPhone? Not physically, of course, but by some electronic method? “What do we do when we get there?”

  “Bring your phone.” He clicked off.

  I looked down at the brick police station. This was a book I had already read. The initial shocking call, getting the ransom together, waiting for instructions. Since I would be carrying my own phone, I would not be racing from telephone booth to telephone booth, but I would probably be given directions designed to lose any police surveillance. If you hadn’t promised Elisa an immediate rescue, you wouldn’t even need the police, a voice nagged.

  Wrong. Elisa’s my daughter. I’d never let them keep her.

  Meanwhile, I was still confused about who was doing this. I had been sure that Kathleen was the victim. She had disappeared, after all. And who—­and where—­was the other man from the restaurant? I had been imagining him just as innocent as Kathleen, not suspecting that the flutes of champagne that arrived at their table from their new friends had probably been laced with Rohypnol. Now I didn’t know anything.

  I looked back at the police precinct. If I were being watched and had been warned not to involve the police, it would look suspicious if I went back inside. No, I would have to call Frank and let him know the plan.

  But carefully. You won’t live to regret it if you do. For the first time I realized that I was a target as well. As long as I could be used to find Elisa, I was safe. But once they had her and I had been lured out on the sand on Fire Island, shooting me would be as easy as knocking over a traffic cone.

  Don’t think about that now.

  And don’t phone anyone from the van. It would have been easy for them to plant a listening device underneath it while I was inside talking to Frank. They knew where I lived; they had probably tapped the landline as well. And my iPhone? I started to ask Siri if a smartphone could be bugged, then stopped. Why let them know what I was thinking?

  I started the van, drove down the slope to the traffic light, and turned east on Nesconset Highway. Where could I safely call from? Progress had done away with most public phones. Besides, they would see me and assume I was calling the police anyway. I tried to remember where I had seen an inside pay phone. Probably at Smith Haven Mall, but everything was out in the open there. There was a landline in Port Lewis Books, but what if they had gotten to that phone as well? I told myself I was being paranoid, but paranoia wasn’t always wrong.

  Chapter Thirty-­One

  IT WAS STILL before 10 a.m. so I parked in the residents’ lot in Port Lewis and stopped to buy two cappuccinos in the Whaler’s Arms.

  Susie was already inside Port Lewis Books and unlocked the door for me. “Oh, you’re a darling,” she said when she saw the coffee. “Coffee’s one of the things I haven’t gone off yet.”

  Her face was rosy and cheerful once more, her navy overblouse already pushing out slightly. I did not think I could handle another pregnancy crisis without saying something I would regret, but it appeared that for now things were calm. Then Susie said, “I told Paul we’re keeping the baby no matter what.”

  “Good for you! What did he say?”

  “Nothing. But I think he’s starting to realize that it’s part of him too. That sounds so obvious, but I think he was thinking of the baby as this—­I don’t know—­alien. We’ll see. Have you been out mailing books already?”

  I groaned, thinking of the unwrapped orders in the barn. One of the things I promised was fast ser­vice. “No, I still have to wrap. I just wanted to check in here and make some calls.” I thought of something. “Do you have a cell phone I can borrow?”

  “Sure. But I thought you had a better one.”

  “Dead battery.” I made my face rueful. “I’m bad at charging things.” That much was true.

  “Me too,” Susie agreed. “But I keep my phone with me in case Paul has to reach me. He won’t use the bookstore phone.” She moved behind the counter and brought up a maroon Nokia. I could see that it didn’t do any tricks.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s over.”

  She glanced up from the counter, admiring. “Your life is like something out of a book.”

  One I never hope to read again.

  I started to walk back to the small office, then hesitated. Could the whole store be bugged? “I’ll be right back,” I assured Susie.

  Stepping outside into a crisp May day that promised untold delights—­to someone, somewhere—­I started back to the Whaler’s Arms, then stopped. It would look suspicious after I had just walked out carrying two cups of coffee. Instead I turned in the other direction and crossed the street to the Port Lewis Library, which stood a little way up the hill. The white columns in front made the building look grander than it was, but they had a good collection. I knew the library frowned on cell phone use, but I could go downstairs and find a secluded area near the restrooms.

  I smiled at the clerk behind the desk, an older woman I had known for years, then went to the stairs in the rear. Certain that I was being overcautious, I pushed open the door to the ladies’ room and went into a stall. Then I took out the paper with Will’s number and pressed it in rapidly.

  “Hola!”

  “Hi, Will, this is Delhi.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t sound happy about it and my heart began to pound. I realized I did not trust him.

  “Can I talk to Elisa?”

  “I’ll give her a message.”

  “Please?”

  He sighed, loud enough to make sure I understood his displeasure. “Liss?”

  After a moment she was on the line. “Delhi?”

  “Are you around here? Don’t tell me where. They want us to take the 3:30 ferry to Fire Island, to Watch Hill, from West Street in Patchogue.”

  Silence.

  “I know it’s asking a lot. Probably too much.”

  “Oh, no, I’ll do it. I’m the one who got her into this. Besides, all those animals need her.”

  I gave a shaky laugh. “Do you know Patchogue at all?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “West Street. Meet me on the Watch Hill dock a little after three.” I considered telling her to meet me somewhere else, like the Patchogue Library parking lot or outside Friendly’s Ice Cream, but couldn’t guarantee there would be other ­people there for protection. “Don’t let anybody see you before. Walking down the street or anything.”

  “Okay.” Her voice was flat.

  “One more thing. Don’t stay where you are now. I don’t know if they tapped my phone, I’m using a different one now, but if they did they heard our first conversation. I don’t know if they can trace where you are from Will’s phone. Just to be safe.”

  “To be safe,” she agreed.

  “And Elisa? I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll see you at three.”

  Someone came in and went into the stall beside mine. I pushed up against the opposite wall to try and see underneath the partition. Whoever it was had on navy pants and matching navy wedgies. A librarian? I waited, listening to her pee. Finally the stall latch was pulled back and I heard the sound of water, then the soap dispenser. Probably a librarian, though everyone in
Port Lewis took the posted notice to wash your hands seriously.

  As soon as the outer door wheezed shut, I pressed in Frank’s number.

  “Marselli.”

  “Yes, hi. They called me when I was in the parking lot. They want us to take the 3:30 Fire Island ferry from West Street in Patchogue to Watch Hill.” I was talking so fast I had to stop and take a breath. “They’ll give me instructions when we get there.”

  “Watch Hill on Fire Island. Three-­thirty ferry. We’ll be there.”

  “But not—­you know—­they said—­”

  “You won’t know we’re there.”

  “I borrowed my friend’s phone to call. I don’t trust mine.”

  “Good. Only call if there’s a change.”

  “Okay.”

  I hung up as the bathroom door opened again. This time it was a harried mother escorting several toddlers.

  Chapter Thirty-­Two

  RATHER THAN TRY to make another phone call, I decided to drive over to the university and find Colin. I had five hours to fill before I had to be in Patchogue.

  On my way out of the library I picked three books from the shelves in the new releases room and checked them out. I barely noticed the titles. They were my alibi, to explain to anyone watching why I had gone into the library.

  After returning Susie’s phone, I retrieved the van and drove the ten minutes to Stony Brook University. I did not know Colin’s teaching schedule, but if he had a class I would wait in his office until he returned. The university had been part of my life for so long that I turned off Nicolls Road at the main entrance without thinking. I barely saw the cement buildings, useful but without charm, and parked in the multilevel garage near the humanities building. Since I had last been here they had finished the on-­campus Hilton Garden Hotel across the way.

  I entered the brick social sciences building. Having eaten nothing since the coffee from the Whaler’s Arms, I felt too weak to climb the stairs and took the elevator to the fifth floor. I try to eat regular meals, but life often gets in the way. Now I saw lunch as a way to eat up some time.