In Ruins

by Danielle Pearl

  A pause, then, “I know,” he says defeatedly. “I hoped for more from her. She needs certain things to be happy. She wasn’t always like that, or at least I didn’t always know it. But when I told her I was giving it back to reduce my sentence, she couldn’t handle it. She was going to take the kids and move across the country to be near her sister. I wouldn’t have been allowed to leave New York State. She didn’t give me a choice. She promised to bring them up to visit as often as I asked, but if I returned the funds…” He sighs. “I would have lost them anyway, but they would have lost everything else, too. Their home, everything.”

  “You were going to give back the money?”

  “Initially, yes. But Nik, she was adamant that the right thing for my family was to provide for them by doing the extra time. She promised to do right by the kids—that she would be enough parent for both of us. And I wanted to believe her. You know, Tucker, you’re young. When you’re older you’ll understand. When you love a woman, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to make her happy. Even when that woman threatens to take your children and leave.”

  Fuck that. I couldn’t love a woman like that. The woman I would love would be one who would choose her family over any amount of money.

  And then I remember, I already love that woman. And her life is in danger.

  “You shouldn’t have trusted her. And I won’t make that mistake again. E-mail me the instructions directly, and when he calls back I’ll tell him we have the full amount.”

  “You love her, don’t you?”

  I swallow audibly.

  “Nicole told me a little about your relationship, and that you ended it because of what I did to your family. I can’t tell you—”

  “I really don’t want to fucking hear it, Mr. Stanley,” I grit out.

  “Still, you need to know that Carleigh—she was as much a victim in all this as anyone. She is everything that is good in this world, despite who her parents are.”

  “I know that,” I say quietly.

  “I know I have no right to say it, but I’m counting on you, Tucker. I can’t do anything from in here. You have to help her.”

  “I will,” I swear. Not for him, but for the girl I love. I tell him my e-mail address and hand the phone to Nicole.

  His shouting echoes through the phone, and Nicole winces. I head into Carl’s bathroom and splash some cool water on my face and look around for a towel. I find one in the top drawer. Under it is her hairbrush, and I stare at the fine, long golden strands stuck in its bristles. It smells like her shampoo, and the scent chokes me with regret.

  A glimmer from the drawer catches my eye, and I reach down and slip my fingers under the chain that’d been hiding under Carl’s brush. It dangles from my hand, taunting me with my own foolishness. The white gold crown charm I bought her for graduation, the one that should never be anywhere but around her delicate neck, shoved carelessly into a bathroom drawer.

  I trace the shape of the crown with my forefinger. It caught my eye in the jeweler’s window, and I dipped deeply into my savings to afford it, but I wanted her to have something special to remind her who she is to me. My Princess.

  If you ever want to see your precious Princess again…

  How did we get here?

  Again, my eyes glaze over with tears.

  And then my heart fucking stops.

  If you ever want to see your precious Princess again?

  He knew. He knew what I called her.

  And like my brain has suddenly unlocked a memory it didn’t think pertinent before, the truth hits me like an eighteen-wheeler.

  I called her that yesterday. In front of Zayne. When he asked her to stay back to meet with the marketing execs, and she was concerned about our dinner.

  Go, Princess, I’ll meet you after.

  I shove the necklace into my pocket and race out of the bathroom. Nicole is sitting in Carl’s armchair, bawling dramatically, and I can’t muster even the slightest ounce of pity for her. Billy sits in the corner, on the floor, refusing to so much as look at his mother. I can’t really blame him.

  “Nicole.” I try to get her attention.

  She doesn’t even look up.

  “Nicole!”

  She peeks up at me, fearful of what I might do to her.

  “Do you know someone named Zayne Stevens?”

  Her brows attempt a thoughtful frown. “Stevens?”

  My brows raise with impatience.

  “Zayne Stevens. Yes. That’s Art’s son. Will’s old business partner.”

  Bingo.

  “He has Carl.”

  She blinks at me. “Art’s son? Are you sure?”

  “Tell me, does it make sense?” I ask.

  She swallows anxiously. “Art didn’t know what Will had been doing. He lost everything when Will went away. But they were already barely speaking long before then. Last I heard he suffered from pretty bad depression.”

  “And his son?”

  Nicole shrugs. “He was ten or so the last time I saw him. But Art’s wife left when he lost his money. I think Zayne stayed with Art.”

  Yeah, that’s fucking motive if I ever heard it. “He was our professor for a marketing class.”

  Billy jumps up. “Zayne? As in the guy who drove her here on Halloween?”

  I nod.

  “He was here?” Nicole screeches.

  “Yeah, Nicole. He was here. And if you were any kind of parent you would have been here, too. You would have recognized him, and he never would have had the opportunity to take Carl.”

  But as much as I want to continue to lay into her, I don’t have time.

  “Do you know where Art lives?”

  “I have his old address, but I’m sure they would have had to sell that house.”

  Unlike you. You just had to send your husband to prison to keep it.

  I call Manny, who is as talented with hacking as he is with digital editing, and remind him that he fucking owes me. He still grills me about why I’d want to find out Zayne’s address, but the truth would take time I don’t have, so I offer him money instead. One hundred buys his interest, but not without curiosity, but five hundred buys his services no questions asked. He agrees to help, and minutes later he e-mails me the information for Zayne’s on-campus apartment. I doubt that’s where he’s keeping Carl, and I ask him to try and track down any other addresses he’s had, including any under Arthur Stevens.

  Then I grab my car keys and hurry down the stairs.

  Billy stops me in the foyer. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No you’re motherfucking not.” I don’t have time to argue with him.

  He chases me into the driveway. “She’s my fucking sister!”

  “And she would kill me if I put you in danger, Billy.”

  “You can’t go alone!”

  “I’m not.” I shove him out of my way, jump into the driver’s seat, and dial Cap as I peel out of Carl’s driveway.

  “It’s our professor, man,” I tell him. “Zayne Stevens. His dad was Carl’s dad’s old business partner.”

  “Shit.”

  “Is that Glock still in your dad’s old safe?” Cap and I guessed the combination when we were fifteen, and broke into the safe in Mitch Caplan’s study, shocked to find the handgun.

  “Yeah, I doubt he’s moved it since he’s been back around.”

  “Does Bits know the combo?”

  “Do you think I’d give her access to a fucking gun?”

  Yeah, fair enough. “Call her and give it to her. Tell her to grab the gun and the bullets, and to meet me out front in ten minutes.”

  “You sure about this, Tuck?”

  “Do it. Now.”

  I get a call from Manny just as I hang up. He tells me Art Stevens is in an assisted living facility for the mentally ill, and their family home was sold almost nine years ago.

  Fuck, where the fuck are they?

  I doubt Zayne would use his own apartment, but I send Cap there anyway, since he’s on his
way from the city and he’s closer to campus than I am. Bits is waiting for me when I pull into her driveway, hesitantly holding a bag like it might explode at any second, eyes darting around like she’s worried she’s being set up or something. I almost want to laugh, but there’s nothing funny about any of this shit.

  I fly out of the car and grab the bag from her, checking inside to make sure it contains both the gun and bullets.

  “Tuck? What’s going on? Sammy said you needed this, but…you guys are really scaring me.”

  “I don’t have time to explain right now, Bits. But thank you.” I race back to the car. “Stay in the house and don’t tell anyone about this!” I call back to her.

  And then I’m driving toward campus. Cap should be there by now, and just as I’m thinking it, he calls. “No one’s here,” he says. “The apartment is empty, and his neighbor says he hasn’t been home in days.”

  Fuck.

  “Okay. I’ll call you back.”

  I try to stay calm, but I’m out of ideas. Where the fuck are they?

  My phone buzzes. It’s that fucking stealth app, and my pulse races in terror as I go to answer.

  But it isn’t a call.

  It’s a text. With a photo.

  I click it open, and my stomach boils over with nausea and contempt at the sight of Carl’s half-naked body, marked with the evidence of Zayne’s possession, his release spattered over her bare stomach.

  I have to pull over, and I open my car door just in time to vomit onto the pavement.

  Zayne will fucking pay for this. He will die for this.

  Nicole chooses that moment to call me.

  “What?” I rage at her. She is the perfect place to direct my fury.

  “Did you find her?” she asks shakily.

  “No.”

  She sniffles.

  “I need you to think, Nicole. Where else could he have taken her? Did they have a vacation home? A close relative who lived nearby?”

  “I…No. I don’t think so.”

  “Think harder!” I snarl at her, but she just cries harder instead.

  Then I remember something he said. Right before he violated Carl, he said some weird, cryptic shit about how it was fitting that it would happen where it all began. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

  Manny already said their family home sold years ago, but Art would have bought that house after they started making money. I read that Will and Art started the company the summer after their sophomore year at UPenn. So he could have still been living with his parents then.

  “I gotta go.” I hang up on Nicole and get Manny back on the phone. I ask him to find out Arthur’s parents’ address the year they incorporated Stanley Stevens, which takes him about five minutes since it’s a matter of public record.

  I’m about to make a very dangerous U-turn to head there, but then Manny tells me that house also sold. That a new family currently lives there.

  Fuck!

  Nicole beeps in and I answer with a short-tempered grunt.

  “Maybe…maybe we should just call the police, Tucker.”

  “We’re not risking her fucking life. Will e-mailed me the wiring instructions, and I’m going to wire the money.”

  “Yes, yes, you should,” she says hastily. “But…what if he still doesn’t let her go?” She voices my darkest fear.

  “He has to.” But he doesn’t. And we both know it. “I have to find them.” But I don’t know how. “He said something about being back where it all started. But the house his parents owned back when they started the business—it sold years ago. I can’t figure out where he’d take her.”

  “Art wasn’t living with his parents that summer.”

  What?

  “No, they’d gotten into some big fight about Art wanting to take a leave of absence from school to start the business with Will. They gave him an ultimatum, so he ended up staying with his grandparents. They actually started the business there—in the garage.”

  Where it all started.

  That’s it! It has to be.

  It takes Manny minutes to find the address, which is on the company’s original incorporation documents. The house is still in Morton and Edith Stevens’s names.

  I slam my foot on the gas pedal and race up Old Country Road, flying through the tail end of a yellow light and nearly getting T-boned by a driver too impatient to wait for his light to actually turn green. Asshole.

  I call Cap, read him the address, and tell him to meet me there. He tries to make me promise to wait for him, but I can’t. He doesn’t want me going in alone, and while I know he’s probably right, I can’t let Carl suffer a moment longer.

  The ten-minute drive is the longest of my life. Every other car on the road is my worst fucking enemy, and I swerve around them, changing lanes like a lunatic. I honk at the jerkoff who doesn’t pound the gas the second a light changes, and cut off car after car without a second thought. All I can think about is getting to Carl, and I silently pray that she can forgive me for not getting there sooner.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Tucker

  Present Day

  The sun is setting by the time I reach the address, and sure enough, his stupid fucking premature-midlife-crisis-mobile is sitting out front, parked right on the street. The house is nondescript in every way, a mid-century colonial just like every other one on the block. The once-yellow paint has faded to a urine-like hue that has peeled and chipped away in an obvious lack of care. The grass has been cut at some point, but other than that, the house doesn’t appear to have seen any landscape work in years. And the windows are all shuttered up.

  I park across the street, pull the gun from Bits’s bag, and carefully load the magazine. I’ve never been more grateful for my visits to Pennsylvania to see my cousins, because without Uncle Jerry taking us shooting all those times, I would have no fucking idea what to do with this thing.

  But as it is, I’m a pretty damn good shot.

  With the windows covered tight as they are, it’s impossible to tell if there’s any light coming from the inside, so I decide to take a cautious walk around the perimeter. I keep my gun held out in front of me, silently praying I don’t have to use the thing, but ready to do whatever the fuck it takes to get Carl out of there. I’m a long way from my comfort zone, and I try to tell myself I can do this. But in the back of my mind I know that firing a bullet at a bull’s-eye is a far cry from shooting a living, breathing human being.

  But then, Zayne is not human. The man who took my girl, hurt her, violated her…he’s a motherfucking monster. And the thought makes my fingers tighten around the trigger.

  There are only two entrances—one in the front and one in the back. But I can’t exactly just bust one of them in and rush inside, gun blazing.

  My phone buzzes with a text from Cap, announcing his arrival.

  Thank fucking God.

  I meet him at his car, parked two houses down, and we make a plan. It’s a shit one, but it’s our best shot, and we have the element of surprise, so we have no choice but to hope it’s enough. Cap FaceTimes my phone, and I put mine on mute so nothing can be heard from his end. He’ll have to hold it casually so Zayne won’t guess it’s on, but it will give me insight into where he is, and hopefully a view into the front of the house. I head around to the back and position myself beside the door, keeping my gun at the ready as I wait for Cap to ring the doorbell.

  Ding dong.

  It echoes through the house, and I wait. There’s no guarantee Zayne will even answer it, and we don’t have a Plan B if he doesn’t.

  I lower the volume on my phone and hold it up so I can see the close-up view of the front door.

  “Who is it.” The voice is muffled through the door, but it’s definitely Zayne’s.

  “Mike, your neighbor,” Cap calls back.

  Then the door opens, and my screen displays Zayne’s jeans, and behind them, the house’s entryway.

  “Yeah?” Zayne asks. He already sounds
suspicious. Not good.

  “Hey, man. Uh, sorry to bother you, but is that your car out front?”

  A pause. “Yeah…”

  “Oh. Yeah, I thought so. I just wanted to let you know—the front tires are slashed.”

  “What? What the fuck?”

  “Yeah. Uh, there were a couple of kids walking around drinking a forty. They were being loud so I yelled at them—you see, my grandmother’s sick and she was trying to sleep. I think they thought it was my car. They whipped out a Swiss Army knife and went at two tires before I chased ’em off.”

  Cap sounds good. Convincing.

  “Motherfucker!” Zayne shouts.

  From my view on the phone, I watch him run down the walkway toward his car, where I know he will find the tires we sliced up before making our move.

  Cap follows him slowly, directing the camera behind him so I can see into the house, and I instantly see the only door with light flowing under it.

  Cap’s phone moves again, showing me Zayne at his car, and I make my move.

  I jam my foot just below the doorknob, leaning all of my weight into the kick. I feel the door give, but it isn’t enough. Two more heavy kicks send the wood splintering and then the door flies from the frame, bouncing loudly off the opposite wall. I wince as the bang reverberates through the house, but a glance down at my phone shows that Zayne is still at his car, ranting and cursing about the little shits who slashed his tires.

  The house is small. One story, no more than two bedrooms. There is only one closed door I can see, the same one with the light on. I pray Carl is in there, and I rush down the hall, gun drawn.

  The door is unlocked, and I go right in, and even with the pictures I saw earlier, the motherfucking video, nothing could have prepared me for the sight of the girl I love, eyes wide and terrified, gagged and tied helplessly to a bed. Her shirt has been draped over her breasts and her skirt pulled down over her thighs, at least offering her some semblance of modesty. But her day-old mascara paints shadowy watercolors under her eyes where her tears dried in abstract shapes of fear and hopelessness.

  Her face registers shock that shifts to the most beautiful shade of relief when she realizes it’s me. I hurry over to her, conscious that we don’t have much time. She tries to talk through the gag, but all I make out are desperate whimpers. I shove the gun in the back of my waistband and retrieve the pocketknife I used to slash Zayne’s tires, and proceed to carefully slice through the gag before hastily moving on to the cables binding her wrists to the headboard.