by E. M. Parker
“Jesus, what’s the matter with you? Do you know what’s happening right now? Olivia is down here somewhere, and she’s in danger.”
“I know she is. And I’m taking care of it right now.”
Without warning, Natalie lunged at her, swinging the metal rod, barely missing Fiona’s head.
With Natalie momentarily off balance, Fiona drove into her, shoulder-first, knocking her backwards. She flailed aimlessly before crashing into a large storage rack filled with gallon-sized paint cans. The rack immediately collapsed and the cans fell forward. Natalie laid motionless underneath the pile. Fiona had considered pulling her out but let the thought drift away. She instead turned in the direction where she’d heard footsteps.
Iris.
Not being able to see her, she called out. “Hey, I’m over here. Did you manage to…”
The footsteps were not Iris’s.
She didn’t even have time to gasp before the heavy blow to her face turned everything black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
GREER WAS THE FIRST TO SPOT HER. “Look, right there,” he said as he grabbed Sullivan by the arm. She spun around in the direction of his flashlight, then added her own.
Olivia was crouched down in a far corner underneath a dim florescent bulb. Arthur Finley was sprawled out on the floor beside her, writhing in pain while he clutched the gaping wound in his leg. When Sullivan turned her flashlight on him, he looked up.
“Oh God, please help me! Please, she’s going to kill me!”
When Sullivan turned her flashlight back on Olivia, she noticed the knife in the girl’s hand. She and Greer drew their weapons simultaneously.
Appearing completely unfazed by their presence, Olivia calmly stood up and faced them. She held the knife out in front of her. Arthur’s blood covered the blade, trickles of red still spilling from the tip.
“Put the knife down, Olivia,” Sullivan said. “Whatever happened here doesn’t have to go any further.”
When Olivia took a step toward them, Sullivan and Greer pointed their weapons.
“Put it down, Olivia,” Greer repeated.
She ignored his command and took another step forward, the knife still held out in front of her. “If you kill her, she can finally be with me.”
Apart from the surreal intensity of the scene, something about Olivia’s voice struck Sullivan as odd.
“You don’t have to do this,” she insisted. “We know about your sister. We know what happened to her. Let us help. Please.”
Olivia stopped, regarded Sullivan with a blank, distant stare, then turned back to Arthur. “Do you really know what he did?”
“Yes, Olivia. We do.”
“Then you should know why I want to kill him.” She crouched down beside Arthur, the knife hanging at her side.
Sullivan aimed her gun at Olivia’s arm and released the safety. “Don’t do it.”
“If I kill him, then you’ll kill her, right? We’ll both finally be free.”
“Olivia, that’s not how this is going to–”
“Stop calling me that!”
Sullivan turned a stunned eye to Greer, who was at an equal loss for words.
“What are we supposed to call you?” Sullivan asked after a long silence.
“Call her by her name.” The voice came from behind.
Sullivan and Greer spun around to see Iris Matheson’s startled face in the beam of their flashlights. She immediately held her hands up.
“What are you doing down here?” Greer asked as he lowered his light.
“You don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you?” Iris asked as she pointed over Greer’s shoulder.
He turned his flashlight back on the girl.
“That’s not Olivia,” Iris continued. “It may be her body, but that body is a vessel for something else now.”
“A vessel? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Greer asked.
“If it’s not Olivia, who is it?” Sullivan countered in a measured tone that indicated her willingness to be convinced.
“My name is Hannah.”
The raw power of her voice made Sullivan and Greer jump. Before they had the chance to react further, she was on top of Arthur. The tip of the knife was digging into his neck just enough to lightly puncture the skin.
“You had your chance to help me, and you didn’t. Don’t act like you care now, when it’s already too late. He’s going to die, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” She dug the knife in deeper, sending a thin trickle of blood down Arthur’s neck.
“And if you try to stop me, you can die too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
FIONA REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE FEELING of heavy pressure on top of her chest. She tried to fight against it, but the weight was too heavy and her strength too depleted. Her head throbbed from the blow and she attempted to move her hand up to assess the damage, but something knocked it away before she could. The sudden pain in her hand caused her heavy eyes to shoot open.
The first thing Fiona saw when she adjusted to the lack of light was the thick rubber sole of Noah’s boot. Then she felt it as he pushed it deeper into her sternum, pressing her already sore back even harder against the cold cement floor. With all the air squeezed out of her lungs, she couldn’t scream.
“Fortunately for you, she’s not dead,” Noah said as he pushed his boot down harder. When Fiona began flailing against him in a desperate search for air, he took his foot off her chest and drove it, heel-first, into her stomach.
With the air suddenly restored to her lungs, Fiona let out a deep wail of pain. A call for help had to be next. But before she could attempt the words, Noah was on top of her, pressing his considerable weight down against the whole of her body, locking her hands above her head.
“Don’t you dare, after what you did to her. Look.” Keeping one hand wrapped against Fiona’s wrists, he used the other to grab her face. “I said look,” he repeated, turning her head toward the mound of paint cans covering Natalie’s motionless body. After holding her there for what felt like an eternity, Noah finally released his painful grip. “You don’t get to play the victim, do you understand? You came into our apartment, uninvited, with the purpose of doing what? Huh? Did you think you were going to take Olivia and walk out of there without anyone noticing? Did you think you were going to just take her from her mother? From me? I work my ass off every day to make sure that child has a roof over her head and food in her mouth. And here you come, riding in on some shiny white horse, thinking you’re going to save the goddamn day. You can’t even take care of your own child. What makes you think you can take care of someone else’s?”
Noah pressed down harder against her. “Do you remember our conversation in the coffee shop? I told you that the two of us were destined to meet and I offered my help. You flat out dismissed me. Do you remember what I said about what would happen the next time we met?”
Fiona shook her head, as she held what little breath she had tightly in her chest.
“I predicted that you would need my help. And guess what? You do. You need my help to let you leave this place alive. Don’t you?” He released his grip on her wrists and slowly slid his hands up the side of her body, across her chest, and onto her neck, where he rested them lightly across her windpipe. “Don’t you need my help, Fiona?”
Seeing no other choice but to play along, Fiona nodded.
“Then ask for it.”
When she didn’t respond, Noah wrapped his hands around the diameter of her neck and squeezed ever so gently.
“I said ask for it.”
Fiona fought hard against the indignity of emotion that caused a cluster of tears to pool in her eyelids, but they came streaming down her face anyway. “Please, help me.”
Noah brought his face down until it was mere inches from hers, looked into her eyes – seeing nothing in them that sparked even a fleeting moment of compassion – and smiled. “Absolutely not.”
Suddenly, and without a
ny change in his demeanor, Noah tightened his grip around Fiona’s neck, slowly pinching off the air, until the pressure behind her eyes caused them to bulge from the sockets. A milky white film clouded her vision, blurring Noah’s monstrous features until they disappeared into the ether of her oxygen-starved brain. She slapped, punched, scratched, and gouged, but no amount of resistance could free her from his grip.
Then she thought about Jacob, and the yellow marigolds that he would bring to her funeral, and the bright, sunny, sandy beach that they would now never get to experience together, and the wrongs that she would never make right, and she fought harder, blindly wailing away at any part of Noah that her hands could strike, until she made contact with something soft, and, based on his abrupt release of her throat, exceptionally delicate.
He fell off Fiona just enough to allow her to momentarily squirm away from him. She managed to get only a few feet before he grabbed her hard by the back of the head, bringing a forceful and immediate end to her retreat.
He pulled her head back and kept it there, stretching her neck to an unbearable degree, before finally saying, “You gouge my eye, I bash your skull. Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.”
Noah pulled her head back a few more inches before suddenly releasing it. There was a loud cracking sound before his body fell on top of her, then to the ground, in a heavy, lifeless heap.
“Get up, Fiona.”
She’d heard Quinn’s voice, but couldn’t process the fact that he was there until she felt his hands scoop her off the ground.
She breathed air into her lungs in quick, shallow bursts until the burning in her chest and throat began to subside. Quinn held her up until her legs were strong enough to support herself.
“Are you okay?”
Fiona nodded. “Thank you.” She draped her arms around his broad shoulders and clung to them, as her body succumbed to the weight of the moment by releasing violent spasms of emotion.
“You’re welcome,” Quinn said, tightening his grip of support. “What’s happening down here? My mom sent all these cryptic text messages telling me to hurry over, then she told me to come down here. Where is she?”
In an instant, all thoughts of Noah, and Natalie, and her own brush with death, went away, as did the pain in her chest and throat. Her circuits went live with a sudden burst of adrenaline.
“She’s looking for Olivia.”
Quinn surveyed around the vast, dark space. “Where could they possibly be?”
The image was quick, flashing in and out of her mind with the bright burst of a camera bulb. But it illuminated everything around her.
“This way. We have to hurry.”
She grabbed Quinn’s hand and led him through the darkness; confidently navigating the space like a submarine’s sonar navigates the blackest depths of a murky ocean.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
WHEN SULLIVAN AND GREER ADVANCED on the girl with their weapons drawn, Iris stepped in front of them.
“What are you doing, Mrs. Matheson? Get out of the way.”
Greer tried to move around her, but Iris blocked his path.
“Step aside, Mrs. Matheson,” an irritated Sullivan added.
Iris stood her ground. “No. This isn’t the way. You have to lower your guns.”
“We will not,” Greer said emphatically. “She’s going to kill him.”
Iris was equally emphatic. “If you take one step further with those guns pointed at her, she absolutely will kill him.”
“We don’t have time to discuss this,” Sullivan said. “And if you continue to interfere with–”
“Look at her,” Iris interrupted. “She hasn’t moved.”
It was true that she had not made another move since threatening to kill Arthur, even with the guns pointed at her. She remained in her original crouched position, the knife perfectly still in her hand, regarding the three of them like they were oddities from some foreign civilization. But the threat she posed was still very real, and it was still Sullivan’s responsibility to neutralize it.
“We don’t wait until someone pulls the trigger before we act, Mrs. Matheson. People die that way. We die that way.”
“But no one has to die here, Detective Sullivan,” Iris asserted. “If she really wanted to kill Arthur, she had plenty of opportunity before now. And there would have been nothing you could have done to stop her. It’s not too late, but only if we do it another way.”
Sullivan looked at Greer. He shook his head in disagreement.
“What other way?” Sullivan asked reluctantly.
“You have to lower your guns first,” Iris directed.
Sullivan considered Iris’s words for a long moment before turning back to Greer and nodding. “Do it, Marcus.”
“What? Absolutely not. She’ll move on him the second we drop them.”
“Please, Detective Greer. You have to trust me.” Iris put a gentle hand on his forearm. “Like Detective Sullivan said, we don’t have much time.”
When he looked over at Sullivan and saw that she had already lowered her gun, he begrudgingly did the same.
“Now what?” a visibly nervous Sullivan asked.
Iris turned her attention to the girl. “She’s been waiting for something.”
“What?”
Iris ignored Greer’s question and began walking toward her.
When she did, the grip around Arthur’s neck tightened.
Sullivan and Greer instinctively reached for their guns.
“No,” Iris said sternly. “I told you that’s not necessary.” When the pair lowered their guns, Iris addressed the girl. “Where is Olivia?”
Hesitation, then, “Hiding.”
“Hiding where?”
Silence.
“It’s safe now. No one is going to hurt you. Why don’t you tell her to come out?”
“Because it’s not safe.”
“Why do you think that, Hannah?”
“Because he’s still here.” She brought the knife back up to Arthur’s throat.
He looked at Sullivan and Greer with desperate, pleading eyes, and whimpered. “Please help me.”
Every cell in Sullivan’s body ached with doubt as she stopped herself from reaching for the gun.
“You don’t have to do that,” Iris said calmly, pointing at the knife in the girl’s hand. “It won’t bring you the peace you’re looking for.”
“I’m trapped here, and it’s all because of him. All I want is to leave this terrible place, and he won’t let me.”
“How is he keeping you trapped here?”
“Because I’m worried that he and Donald Tisdale are going to do to Olivia what they did to me, and I can’t let that happen.”
“Is that why Donald Tisdale is dead? Because of what he did to you?”
Silence.
“It’s okay to tell us, Hannah.”
“But I’ve already tried to tell you, all of you. No one listened.”
“We’re listening now.”
When the girl looked at Sullivan, the tension in her face softened. “You felt me in Donald’s apartment, didn’t you?”
Sullivan nodded, ignoring the intense heat of her partner’s glare.
“And that’s why I let you find those pictures, because I thought you would help me.”
The hardened disbelief in Greer’s eyes suddenly melted. “How did she know about—”
“I do want to help you,” Sullivan answered.
“No you don’t. You only want to help him now.”
“That’s not true. I want to help you too.”
“Then why don’t you understand why I have to do this?”
“Because killing is wrong.”
“He doesn’t think so.” She looked down at Arthur. “Do you?” She pushed the tip of the knife into his neck again, producing another trickle of blood.
His scream caused Greer to reach for his gun. Before he could aim it, his arm flew backward, sending the gun skyward in the opposite direction.
When Greer attempted to come to her aid, he too was knocked to the ground, landing on the cement floor with a hard crash.
An angry female voice suddenly rose above the loud ringing in Sullivan’s ears.
“Hannah, no!”
Sullivan didn’t recognize the voice. She only knew that it didn’t belong to Iris. As she struggled to find her bearings in the dark space, she heard the voice again.
“You don’t have to do this anymore. Olivia is safe. No one is going to hurt her.”
As Sullivan finally staggered to her feet, she saw that the voice belonged to Fiona Graves. She and a man who Sullivan did not know stood next to Iris, only a few feet away from Arthur and the girl.
“Killing him is not going to help Olivia,” Fiona continued. “It’s only going to send her to a dark place, just like the one you’re in right now. Do you want that for her?”
The girl said nothing, but her face quivered with a fleeting hint of emotion.
“Let him go, Hannah,” Iris added. “We all understand what he did to you now. The police will make sure that he answers for it.”
The girl kept her eyes on Fiona. “You saw everything that happened.”
Fiona nodded. “All of it. I know what Donald did to you, and how Arthur helped him.”
“And you also saw what I did to Donald.”
“Yes. And I know that you think doing the same thing to Arthur will help you, but it won’t. The reason you can’t leave doesn’t have anything to do with him. Even if you killed him right now, you would still be in that dark, lonely, cold place, desperately trying to reach out to your sister, because you know that Arthur isn’t the reason she’s unsafe.”
Fiona took a few steps forward as the knife in the girl’s hand slowly fell away from Arthur’s neck.