by Alan Russell
Nina started at the sound of another shrew dropping into the bucket. Then the horrifying fighting started anew.
CHAPTER EIGHT
All eyes were on Terrence Donnelly as he approached a bank of microphones. The press conference was taking place right at the airport. As Donnelly looked over the gathering, the crush of media quieted down.
The gravity of the situation could be read on the congressman’s face. Usually he was the picture of confidence, but now he was clearly hurting. And he was also clearly human.
The congressman looked out to the room. “The woman I love is missing. If I could move heaven and earth to find her, I would. But what one man can’t do, one state can. I am calling on all of Alaska to help me find my fiancée.”
Donnelly blinked away tears, and then in a husky voice offered a $2 million reward for information leading to the safe return of Nina Granville.
Deputy Chief of Staff Cody Wood was Donnelly’s point man with the Alaska State Troopers, as well as the overall investigation. Since Nina Granville had first been reported missing, Sarge had maintained constant communication with the authorities. He’d given the Alaska State Troopers a head’s-up that the congressman would be offering a reward. AST hadn’t liked that idea, claiming they didn’t have enough personnel to handle the expected deluge of leads, but Donnelly wasn’t going to be deterred. Sarge had told AST that he could bring in private contractors to assist them, but the local authorities had liked that idea even less. They didn’t want “mercenaries” on their turf. The higher-ups at AST had also balked at the idea of the Feds taking over the case, although they were already working with the FBI field office in Anchorage.
So far there were no leads, despite media speculation to the contrary. Donnelly hoped the reward money would change that.
The congressman’s media relations director, Marilyn Grant, scheduled several press events. Donnelly was making sure his fiancée’s disappearance got maximum airplay. The Chena River was their second stop. Nina Granville had last been seen in the proximity of the river in downtown Fairbanks. Donnelly positioned himself with the river behind him and asked anyone who might have seen anything to come forward. Several hundred people had gathered for the press conference. His bigger audience would be watching on television.
After finishing with his spot, the congressman’s inner circle conferred inside of a Yukon SUV. In addition to Donnelly, Marilyn, and Sarge was Chief of Staff Tom Howard.
“I’m afraid we have a potential situation,” said Sarge, “that might or might not rear its head during the time we’re here.”
“Let’s assume Murphy’s Law is in play,” said Howard. Those on staff referred to him as “Doubting Thomas.”
“There’s a story that hasn’t yet broken,” Sarge said, “that suggests Nina is a runaway bride.”
“That’s bullshit,” said Donnelly.
“Of course, it is,” said Marilyn, “but it’s not surprising. What’s the basis of the story?”
Terrence was the third Donnelly whom Marilyn had worked for. In appearance she looked like a kindly grandmother; in reality she was as tough as nails.
“Nina made some entries into her tablet,” Sarge said. “They were harmless, but I can see how they might be open to misinterpretation. I had AST get me a printout.”
He handed the page to Donnelly. The congressman studied the paper and then said, “So what?”
Marilyn and Doubting Thomas quickly scanned the sheet. Entered on it were the words:
Learn to surf.
Go on one of those cross-country skiing excursions where you ski from lodge to lodge, stopping for a getaway in each.
Take scuba diving lessons. Get good enough to look for hidden treasure.
Work to save an endangered species (preferably something cute—is that silly?—yes, but still find something that’s cute)
Have kids? I think so, but have only two, and don’t start popping them out until I’m thirty-five.
Tango in Argentina.
Participate in an archaeological dig.
Do something that matters.
“How is anybody getting a runaway bride out of what’s here?” asked Donnelly.
“You’re not mentioned,” Sarge said. “Neither is the wedding or the honeymoon. And what she wrote could be interpreted as dissatisfaction with the course of her life. The list could be read as her wanting to go off the reservation so that she could pursue her list of activities.”
Donnelly was shaking his head. He wasn’t buying it. “How do we even know when Nina wrote this? It could be a long-ago wish list.”
“AST was able to determine it was written during her flight to Alaska.”
“We can explain it in terms of your honeymoon,” said Marilyn, “and future vacations the two of you were planning.”
“I don’t remember our discussing any of those things.”
“Maybe she was hoping to talk you into doing some of those activities with her,” said Howard.
Hearing such an explanation from Doubting Thomas didn’t sound right to anyone.
“Nina wanted to go somewhere warm and exotic,” said Donnelly.
“Still,” said Marilyn, “the two of you hadn’t yet settled on a destination.”
“This by itself is nothing,” insisted Donnelly.
Sarge shifted in his seat. His discomfort communicated itself to Donnelly, who said, “You got anything else?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Sarge said, “but you know how the media is.”
“Spare me the soft soap.”
“During Nina’s flight from Seattle to Fairbanks, she sat next to Mark Cunningham, an executive for ExxonMobil. According to Cunningham, Nina told him she was visiting Fairbanks for pleasure, and not for business.”
“Nina was probably just protecting her privacy,” said Donnelly.
“Cunningham also said Nina told him she was meeting up with an old college friend and that the two of them would be doing some extended sightseeing. Although she didn’t specify the sex of her college friend, Cunningham got the impression that she was meeting up with a male friend, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was an old beau.”
“Old beau shit,” said Donnelly. “Do I need to point out that Nina went to Smith? We’re talking about a women-only college.”
The congressman shook his head. “This is just the kind of thing we don’t need. It’s static. It’s a distraction. If it surfaces, we have to hit it head-on and discount it. We need to keep everyone’s eyes on the prize, and that’s Nina. Someone took her. Someone else must have seen something.”
He opened his mouth, but then shut it tight. Everyone in the vehicle pretended not to notice his trembling lips.
CHAPTER NINE
It had been the longest night in Nina Granville’s life. Even if she hadn’t been forced to listen to shrews fighting to the death, she wouldn’t have slept. The one surviving shrew was trapped in a bucket, but that wasn’t what was unnerving her. The monster who had raped her was only fifteen feet away. All night she’d been thinking about escape and revenge, but was still short a plan for either.
She watched as Baer stretched out his arms and then pushed aside his fur blankets. Nina turned her head from him and pretended to sleep, although she doubted she was fooling him. He was more animal than human, using his senses in ways that reminded her of Caesar, the Granville family’s German shepherd. But Caesar was domesticated. Baer was not.
Soundlessly he walked to the door. It was still dark outside, and Nina guessed that dawn was at least an hour away. There was a part of her that wondered if dawn would ever arrive again.
“It snowed,” he said, sounding pleased.
The words made it clear he knew she was awake, just as he knew she was listening to him now. “But it will only last for two days at most, so I’m going to have to get the team moving. I need to retrieve whatever provisions are salvageable that survived the drop out of the plane.”
Nina wondered if he planned to tak
e her with him. Would it be worse going with him or staying behind?
She listened as he used the toilet, making no effort at propriety. Civilization was an encumbrance to him. Nina pretended not to feel her own pressing bladder. She would not engage him; she would not beg.
“If things go right,” he said, “I’ll be back within three days.”
Baer didn’t seem to notice her lack of response, or he didn’t care. After a while she heard the sound of sizzling meat, and then smelled it. Since she’d adopted a vegetarian diet, the aroma of cooking meat had lost its appeal for Nina. There were even times when she felt sickened by the odor of sizzling flesh. But not now. The scent of the meat was making her salivate.
Baer seemed to divine her hunger and its cause.
“It’s the fat,” he said. “When you live in the north, you crave it more than anything else. In the middle of winter, it’s what keeps you alive. More than starches, more than carbohydrates, you want the fat. That’s where you get your energy. In January we’ll be thankful for all the pemmican I’ve stored away. I used the recipe of the native peoples, half rendered fat and half dried meat.”
Nina tried to tell herself it sounded disgusting, but at the moment it didn’t. Usually she kept GORP around to snack on—good old raisins and peanuts. And while she wouldn’t have turned down a handful of GORP, the thought of it didn’t have the appeal of the aroma coming her way.
Baer brought her a hunk of the meat in a pan different from the one he’d cooked in. Nina supposed the battered cookware served as platters and plates, and the canteen he was holding was the water glass.
“Room service,” he said.
She didn’t move as he unlocked her cage and placed the pan inside the enclosure. Her eyes remained closed, and she tried not to react as he reached inside her pen and removed the shrew bucket with its wobbly stick.
“Just like I told you,” he said. “One living shrew and a lot of bones.”
She heard the click of a hasp being opened and the rasp of a knife being pulled from its sheath. She tried not to flinch at the angry cry of a shrew being speared, and its last scratching.
“Stinks in life and stinks in death,” said Baer. He walked over to the cabin door and stepped outside to dispose of the shrew.
Nina made for the open door of her pen. Her legs were through the opening, but her body didn’t follow. Baer walked back inside. Their eyes met, and Nina made a quick retreat back inside of her cage. Baer continued to stare at her. His scrutiny unnerved Nina, and she turned from his gaze. In his right hand, he held his large knife. He must have wiped the shrew’s blood off in the snow; only an icy, red residue remained. He cleaned the carbon steel, wiping it on the sleeve of his coat in a stropping motion that Nina couldn’t help but find threatening.
“Were you planning on going somewhere?” asked Baer.
“I-I wanted to stretch my legs.”
Nina had never been a good liar, and Baer seemed to find her explanation amusing. “So, you wanted to stretch your legs?”
She didn’t answer.
He walked toward her pen, and Nina tried to get as far away from the opening—and him—as possible.
“Here’s your honey pot,” Baer said, replacing the bucket. “Now you got all the comforts of home.”
He hadn’t yet put away his knife. Nina stared at the sharp blade. It scared her, but looking at him was even scarier. “Before I go,” he said, “I’ll need a bon voyage. You catch my French?”
“No,” said Nina.
“Oh, I think you parlez-vous just fine.”
“No,” she said again.
“I guess you like it rough.”
She looked up into his dead eyes. “I guess you must like the idea of dying by lethal injection.”
“That’s not my idea of death do us part. All you have to do is honor and obey me, and we’ll get along fine. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the love part. And I hate to step on your fantasy, but I’ve been to this rodeo a few times before, and I’m the one that’s walked away from Mrs. Baer, the first and second. Besides, there’s no capital punishment in Alaska. How’s that for enlightenment?”
She spoke quickly and fiercely, trying to get through to him. “You have no idea how many people are looking for me right now. My fiancé is Terrence Donnelly, Congressman Terrence Donnelly. Terrence and his family have enormous influence. I’m sure he’s brought all sorts of resources into play. When you’re caught, you don’t want to make matters any worse for you than they already are.”
“I’m not too concerned, Mrs. Baer.”
“I am not Mrs. Baer. I never will be Mrs. Baer. Do you think you can hit me over the head with a club like some kind of caveman and call me your wife? Women aren’t property.”
“I guess I’m old school. Ever hear the term ‘wilderness bride’? That’s what you are now, Mrs. Baer. Women used to come willingly, or not so willingly, out to the wilderness.”
He closed the space between them. There was no place for her to escape.
“You can make it easy on yourself, or you can make it hard. Out here there’s only one law, and that’s the law of survival. That’s the start and finish of everything. So the question to you is: Do you want to survive?”
“If the cost is submitting to you, then I would sooner die.”
“Your choice,” he said, and came at her.
Nina tried to claw his eyes, but he grabbed her left hand, crushing her fingers. She screamed, almost blacking out from the pain. That’s where he’d maimed her, where he’d cut away her ring finger.
Baer pressed his knife against Nina’s throat, but she didn’t yield. She bucked and kicked and slapped, but he used his weight to pin her body down, and then he slowly cut off her air supply until she lost consciousness.
CHAPTER TEN
Nina was still seeing stars when she awoke. It was like awakening with the flu. Her thoughts were hazy, her temples throbbed, and her throat burned. It had probably been fewer than two minutes since Baer applied the sleeper hold on her, but that had been more than enough time for him to violate her. The stickiness she felt between her legs told her that much.
Her fog gave her an excuse to not think. She could hear Baer moving around the cabin, preparing for his trip. In her fugue it was like background noise, a television playing in another room. She couldn’t be sure if he talked to her or not. There came a time when Nina realized he was gone. His absence took some of the weight off her chest, but at the same time she realized how alone she was.
Living in Manhattan there were always sounds of people on the move. Nina had even invested in a white-noise setup so as to drown out the racket and give her some peace. She’d picked the sound of rain falling. What she’d never considered while living in New York City was the comfort there was in numbers. In a city of more than eight million people, privacy was usually the rarest of commodities. She was used to the encroachment of people; this seclusion scared her.
At first she didn’t even know she was crying. Unbidden, the tears streamed down her face. She was acting like Louise, her best friend from Smith. As much as she loved Louise, she tired of her waterworks. She’d cried over everything and anything—the boyfriend who forgot her birthday, the A? on an exam. That wasn’t Nina’s way. She wasn’t stoic and didn’t think she lacked sentiment, but she rarely cried and never like this. The tears were nonstop, and she cried without accompanying sounds. She felt broken.
The black dog came on her suddenly. That’s what Winston Churchill had called his bouts of depression. Until now she’d never really understood what that meant. She’d never fallen into that hole, that bottomless pit. But now the black dog had opened its maw, and it felt as if it was consuming her.
For half a day she didn’t move. The tears stopped and started on their own, and she made no effort to wipe them away. Her spirit was too weighted down; it was as if the switch to her soul had been turned off. She tried to be angry, but she felt too tired to even hate Baer.
On
ce or twice Nina tried to reach out to God, but her prayers felt futile. There was only the unrelenting blackness that no light could penetrate. She couldn’t escape, just as she couldn’t escape her cage. The darkness and pain made her yearn for escape, and for the first time in her life she thought of killing herself.
The notion grew in her mind, but she was slow to act upon it—not because of moral qualms or the finality of suicide—but because it was so difficult fighting her inertia to go ahead with it. It was all she could do to consider how she would go about killing herself.
Hanging wouldn’t work. The cage was too small for that. And if there was poison in the cabin, it was out of reach. Cutting her wrists seemed the only viable method available, but even that wouldn’t be easy. She had no knife, no blade of any sort. She wondered if she could use her teeth to tear into her flesh, but there had to be a better way.
She needed to find a loose screw, or nail, or wire somewhere in her holding pen. There had to be something she could use. But the black dog held her immobilized. As much as Nina wanted to escape her pain, she couldn’t muster the will to do it.
It had only been a few weeks earlier when Father Mario had discussed suicide in the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults class that she and Terrence were enrolled in. Everyone referred to the instruction as marriage classes. Nina was taking them so that she might convert to Catholicism. The Donnelly family hadn’t insisted she become a Roman Catholic, but it was clearly something they wanted her to do. Maybe it was lucky she wasn’t officially a Catholic yet. The Methodist church she’d grown up in didn’t categorize suicide as a sin.
She’d always thought pills would be the way to go, but that wasn’t an option. And starving herself would take too long and hurt too much. She wanted to die before the beast returned, before he had a chance to attack her again.