by Abby Knox
The priest pulled out a long silver chain with a small oval pendant on it.
Dash examined it. "Saint Anthony."
Fr. O'Brien squeezed his shoulder. "To help find what is lost."
Dash was not at all religious these days, but whoever and whatever spirit out there that would be willing to help him find his girl, he would take it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Harper
* * *
Slowly feeling around all the brick walls that surrounded her, she listened carefully for noise, any kind of noise at all.
A gap in the stone wall surprised her, and she fell to her knees, her face hitting the dirt. What the hell? She sat up and felt around. The gap was rough, not like a door. And it led into an even tighter space than the concrete and stone room where she was. Claustrophobia began to creep in. Trying her best to control her breathing, she backed out of the tight space and listened.
Nothing but a faint echo of scurrying off in the distance. Probably rats. Great, I've been left to rot along with the rats. I have to find a door and get out of here.
Carefully feeling her way along the damp stone walls, trying so hard not to hyperventilate from fright, Harper finally came to another opening in the wall. Feeling around some more, she realized she had come to a narrow, rough stairway made of concrete. And there was light coming from up above that stairway. It was dim, not enough to illuminate her surroundings, but it was something, and it came from around a door at the top of the stairs. Behind the door, someone was speaking.
Feeling around with her hands, she steadied herself as she made her way, slowly, up the stairs. She moved maddeningly slowly, but she needed to keep herself as quiet as possible. She smirked at the knowledge that, as cold as her feet were, bare feet gave her the upper hand in stealthy movement. Someone might be listening.
She reached the top step and was, of course, met by a door. Gingerly, she slowly tried the knob, which was locked from the other side. Not knowing where she was or what was going to happen to her, she stayed at the top of the stairs and put her ear against the door; she had to try to get her bearings somehow.
Harper didn't know how long she stood there, listening for noises, but eventually, she could understand the words.
"…that distillery on Tenth Street. She knows where the booty is."
"…no telling if she knows, but if we keep her quiet long enough, they'll stop talking about filling in the tunnels, and Girardi can send his men to find the hidden treasure himself."
"…think his people are going to let her live?"
"…we were given strict orders… don't want to make a martyr of her…making it hard to find them gold bricks."
Harper gripped the front of her shirt in her hands as if it might help slow her pulse.
She'd been kidnapped all right. But not because of her asking around about the missing girls. She'd been taken for an entirely different reason.
They were going to make her go into the tunnels and find buried treasure.
Knowing how she reacted to tight spaces, Harper could already envision how that would play out.
Someone was going to panic and end up dead. Most likely her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dash's first stop was the last place he saw Harper: Crow Bar.
The place was still closed due to Declan's clean-up after the bar brawl the other night, but Dash needed to retrace Harper's steps from that morning.
Checking around the place for clues or anything left behind turned up nothing.
He let himself out and locked up. Turning and gazing up and down Haven Street, Dash tried to think about where she might go. She'd said she had errands to run. Where would she have gone in the hour between leaving Crow Bar and heading to work? Groceries? Seemed unlikely. Post office? It would not have been open yet before she went to work. She might have stopped off for some food, seeing as she had been too nervous to eat around Dash's mom that morning.
"That's gotta be it," he said aloud, hopping into his car and peeling out, headed to the bodega to talk to Mr. Ruiz.
His favorite sandwich supplier, however, said he had not seen Harper that morning. He hadn't even needed to look at her photo that Dash was ready to show from his phone.
"Of course, I know who you're talking about. Good girl. Comes in all the time. If I hear anything, I'll let you know."
The next stop was Cherry's Diner, and after that, a taco truck he knew that she liked.
Both stops turned up nothing.
Dash could see no other option besides retracing her steps as best he could and visiting her workplace to study it for clues.
The clock was ticking, and he knew his girl was in trouble.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Harper
* * *
There was something familiar about the voices behind the door.
Harper pressed her ear harder against the wood, but that only managed to muffle the voices. It sounded to her like two women with high-pitched, loud voices were asking whiny questions, and a third voice, a man's, was growing more and more impatient.
Harper backed away and carefully got down on her knees, peering through the crack between the door and the wood floor. She had to lay flat on her stomach on the stairs, adjusting herself silently, to get a good look from that angle.
Just enough light shone through to reveal the shapes of two women gesticulating and bickering while the man drew a crude map on a sheet of paper.
Harper could not see what the man was drawing, but she saw something that made all her hairs stand on end and chilled her down to the marrow in her bones. As expected, one of the women sounded exactly like Pearl, the one who had tricked her on the beach. The other one spoke in a high-pitched whine that cut through the chatter. "I can't hunt for treasure; I don't got the right shoes!"
That voice. And those shoes were hot pink stilettos.
Harper stepped back from the crack in the door and covered her mouth. Had Opal kidnaped her from advertising? But that made zero sense. Maybe those shoes just resembled Opal's. And her voice sounded precisely like the woman. That was Harper's hope. Squinting, Harper tried to get an idea of her location, but she couldn't identify anything familiar in the people's surroundings on the other side of the door.
Adjusting her body to get a better view of her captors, her foot slipped on the concrete step.
Harper's head hit the door before she could right herself.
The noise she made alerted the people in the next room, whose talking halted abruptly.
Harper scrambled to her feet, steadying herself against the wall, and thought about running back down the stairs and hiding in the darkness. But it was too late for that.
The door flew open.
Opal's unmistakable silhouette stood at the top of the stairs.
"Did our little cub reporter have a nice nap? So soon?"
Harper held on to the wall, trying to control her panicked breath, memorizing everything she could see in the room at the top of the stairs.
"Well, are you going to answer me? I would drug you again, but we need to put you to work, sweetie."
A sudden rush of courage flooded Harper's body. There was no way anybody was going to lock her up again behind that door without a fight. Harper rushed up the stairs, taking Opal by surprise. Opal yelped and cried out for help. Having tackled her to the floor, Harper looked up and realized where she was.
That woman—or these people—had locked her in the basement of the escape room.
A toilet flushed, an unseen door opened, and a stocky, square-jawed man wearing a pinky ring appeared. Although he'd replaced his overpriced suit with denim and a canvas work jacket, Harper recognized him as one of the strange guys that had been hanging around the escape room grand opening while she was interviewing people for her newspaper story.
"Opal, what the fuck? I told you not to open that door!" He had all the same demeanor as every goddamn wise guy in Newcastle that Harper had ever seen. A part of her spiri
t felt crushed; it felt like they were never going to rid their town of this scourge. Her heart demanded she wake up and quit complaining because she had infinitely more important matters at hand.
The man's rough arms lifted Harper off of Opal and tossed her back into the basement with less care than one would give a sack of flour.
Harper stumbled down the stairs, twisting her ankle. She howled in pain when she hit the concrete floor.
Again, finding herself in total darkness, she heard the lock secure once again at the top of the stairs.
Harper searched her body for her phone, but then she recalled having dropped it in the car.
She needed a plan to get out of here, and now she'd have to do it on one leg. Sitting up and gingerly examining her hurt ankle with her fingers, she winced in pain. She couldn't know for sure, but it felt like a sprain.
"Fucking hell," she muttered. "I need a plan to escape the fucking escape room. What the fuck is my life?"
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dash
* * *
His visit to the newspaper turned up next to no leads.
Greg had already told him that Harper had never shown up to work that day, so Dash should have known better than to barge in and start questioning people at random at the newspaper office.
However, as he left the Newcastle Dispatch building, he saw coming up the walk a well-dressed group of important-looking people who seemed to be on a mission. At the center of that group was someone everyone in Newcastle would know on sight: the mayor.
When he'd seen Harper speaking to the mayor at the escape room, Dash's memory from Friday propelled him to action. He waited in the lobby as the mayor's staff filed in through the door to the side of the revolving door. The mayor made the mistake of letting himself in through the revolving door, and when it rotated, Dash sprang into the mayor's compartment.
"Excuse me!" the mayor cried in confusion. Grabbing the mayor by the tie and dragging him around and back outside was a crazy thing to do, but Dash felt more and more desperate by the second. The momentary confusion of the mayor's staff, who was now inside the building, gave Dash only seconds to act.
"Have you spoken to Harper Ross today?"
"Who are you?"
Dash still held the front of the mayor's three-piece suit. "My name is Lynwood Fitzgerald, and I'm looking for my missing girlfriend. Harper Ross. Reporter, short, red hair, was talking to you on Friday morning at that event in Dockside. Have you seen or spoken with her today?"
Building security was now outside and closing in, along with the mayor's handlers.
The mayor spoke calmly and put up his hands. "If you take your hands off me right now, I'll answer your questions, and I won't press charges."
Two of the bigger security guards weren't interested in the mayor's leniency. They forcibly put distance between Dash and the mayor. "You're dead meat, asshole. Cops have been notified already."
The mayor smoothed down the front of his suit and put up his hands. "It's all right, boys. I'll talk to this man. He's a constituent and clearly in distress."
The older man possessed an innate ability to bring Dash's blood pressure back down to a simmer.
The mayor addressed Dash calmly and slowly, and Dash knew he was buying time for the cops to show up. "I came here to talk to the editor about the email that my office received on Friday from the young lady you're speaking of."
A police siren wailed from less than a block away. Dude, you're no good to her if you end up in jail.
Quickly, Dash asked the mayor what precisely the fuck he was talking about.
The mayor reached into his coat pocket and pulled out his phone, showing him the email from Harper that had been forwarded to him by an intern. Dash looked at the voice memo attachment and told the man to play it.
When he heard Harper's voice over the scratchy recording, Dash swallowed every urge to let his temper fly. "Your office has been sitting on this since Friday?!"
"I'm very sorry, but the email was received after my interns left on Friday evening. As you can imagine, the mayor's office inbox is quite full by Monday morning.
Dash scrubbed his face and thought. On the street, a patrol car had arrived.
He had one last chance. "Please, will you forward that to someone for me? The police won't search for her for another 48 hours. She's missing, and this man is my last hope."
The mayor looked at him for a beat too long. Two police exited the patrol car and approached, hands on their sidearms.
"It's okay!" the mayor cried out when one of them tackled Dash to the ground and sank a knee into Dash's back. Dash gritted his teeth, refusing to cry out in pain as the cop's knee threatened to crush his spine. Grit from the wet, cold sidewalk lodged into his face as a gloved hand held him in place by the throat.
"Boys, let him talk," the mayor said. "Son, where do I send this email?"
Dash told him the address and watched as the mayor sent the file to Mike's email address.
As the boys in blue hauled him to his feet and dragged him to a waiting patrol car, Dash's fears calmed a little. They were going to find Harper. He knew it.
And then, as they cuffed him and tossed him into the police vehicle, his whole body trembled with laughter. He couldn't help himself because at that moment, the fact hit him. Finally, after all these years, his mouthy little Dockside broad had been heard by City Hall.
Just too damn bad that, wherever she was, his poor Harper must have been terrified.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Harper
* * *
"Come down here and face me, chicken shits!"
Mad as a wet hen—both at her captors and at the ridiculous circumstance of being held at a place she had just "escaped" from three days prior—Harper passed the time in the best way she knew how: annoying everyone until they cracked.
Hearing no answer, she proceeded to recite the First Amendment. She'd had it memorized since the fourth grade, and it never failed to lift her spirits. Much to Fr. O'Brien's dismay, Harper had never memorized her catechism, but for the First Amendment, the Declaration of Independence, she had total recall.
When she finished with the Declaration of Independence, one of her captors pounded on the door. "Shut up, or I gag you!"
She spat back, "Come on down and do it then!"
Raised voices argued back and forth. Harper could hear only a few words. "… can't kill her… we'll never find the loot…"
Harper laughed as her hands attempted to rub some heat into her cold, bare feet. "I know you're not going to kill me! Please come down here and talk to me or enjoy my recitation of the Industrial Workers Union Constitution's preamble. I think you'll enjoy it. My grandpa taught it to me when I was a kid. Of course, it doesn't apply these days, not since your scumbag bosses infiltrated the unions and fucked everything up for all the decent people in town."
She began but had barely recited the first sentence when the door at the top of the stairs flew open.
"I told you to shut up!"
The square-jawed man looked down at her, his fire-plug-shaped frame silhouetted by the dim lights behind him.
Harper replied, "You prefer show tunes? I know all of them. Well, I'm off-key on Into the Woods, but who among us can carry a Sondheim tune, am I right?"
The man descended the stairs slowly, carrying a roll of duct tape.
"Russo ain't payin' me enough for this job," the man growled, loudly loosening a length of tape from the roll, a sound that crawled up Harper's spine.
Russo. That was not a local crime family that she knew of. She swallowed. "Okay, listen. Do what you gotta do, but can you please tape up my ankle while you're down here? I think it's broken."
The man paused. "What?"
She took a stab at an answer that would convince him. Based solely on the snippets of conversation she'd overheard, she only knew she was needed alive and in one piece. "You need me to help you with something, correct? You're holding me for someone above your pay grad
e. Well, you don't want one of Girardi's men to show up and find me unable to walk, do you?"
The man paused at the bottom step, saying nothing at first. Harper listened to his breathing, an odd kind of rasp that pinged something in her brain. Where had she heard it before?
The realization hit her. He was the one who had called the newspaper office on Friday. He was the one who had threatened her life without knowing who he was talking to. Of course.
"I don't work for Girardi. But when I find that booty, that little bitch will be working for the Russos."
Harper swallowed and gathered her thoughts as the man called out over his shoulder. "Pearl! Opal! Lock the door behind you and get down here!"
He then turned to Harper. "They're gonna make sure you behave while I tape up your ankle. Don't even think about trying anything funny. Nobody's getting out that door. After I fix you up, we're going out another way."
A shiver ran down Harper's spine. "What way?"
"We're gonna go on a little treasure hunt. I am done waiting for my half-wit brother. You're going to find me that hidden mafia treasure, and I'm keeping it for myself."
"I don't know anything about any treasure," she said. "And what I have heard about it is all legends and myths."
The square-jawed man looked at her with the face of pure evil. "Don't lie to me, little girl. I know who you are, and I know that distillery is the key to finding what's mine."
Harper laughed in his face. "Hey, idiot. My moms moved up the date of their renovation project. The tunnel under the still is probably already bricked in."
The man's smile was maniacal. "Well, you see, there's not a single construction company in this town that doesn't ultimately owe favors to ol' Ralph. I'm sure they've already found a reason to delay the work. But fuck him, 'cause I'm finding it first. And once I do, he ain't gonna have any cash left for the lawyers, and he will rot in prison. Then, this town belongs to my gang. Once you help me find the stash? Then, by all means, your little construction project can carry on."