got a brilliant idea. “Let’s find out. I’ll go back to the park bench where they started. You wait at the corner. Then, as soon as I sit on the bench, you close your eyes and start walking. I’ll come running and we’ll see how far you manage to get.”
I could tell he didn’t like the suggestion by his thoughtful scowl. “Why don’t I be the coach, and you be the blind girl?”
“Uh, ’cause I was the blind girl for twenty years and I could walk without my eyes faster than you walk with yours. Stevie was new at this. Like you.” I bent down to pat Myrtle’s head. “Come on, Myrt, we’re back on duty.”
“I hate when you make perfect sense,” Mason said.
Myrt opened her eyes and sighed heavily, then got upright again, stretched and farted at the same time.
I handed Mason Myrtle’s leash and jogged back around the corner, then back down the sidewalk to the bench. I sat down and waved at him, where he stood on the corner with Myrt. “Okay, close your eyes and go!” I called.
So he scrunched his eyes tight and started walking. I got up and jogged to the corner, rounding it just in time to see him bean himself on a telephone pole, take a step back, trip over Myrtle and land on his ass. He’d made it about twenty feet.
“Jeez, don’t kill yourself, for crying out loud.” I made it to him, helped him up and almost choked trying not to laugh at him.
He handed me the leash and rubbed his forehead. “It’s harder than I thought.”
“It’s harder than most people think.”
He nodded, looking at me oddly. Like he was feeling sorry for me. I pointed a forefinger at him. “Don’t do that, Mace. Don’t put on that ‘poor, poor pitiful Rachel’ face. I was fine blind. Got rich and famous blind. Did better than most sighted people do.”
“I know you did.”
“Let’s get a stylus, check that phone to see if it was hers, and if so, who she was talking to right before she vanished.”
“Lunch for you and Myrtle first. Call and invite Amy to join us, okay?”
I lifted my brows. “So you don’t think my feeling that there’s some connection is completely insane, after all?”
“I’ve seen too much to think any of your feelings are insane, Rachel. So what do you say? Food?”
I was not one to argue when food was on the line. Nor was Myrtle, whose bulldog smile appeared the second he said the word.
Stevie had given up the screaming and swearing, crying and pleading, halfway through the first night. She’d given up shaking and tugging at the bars of her cage after what felt like twenty-four hours. Neither of these things had been a choice. She’d stopped screaming because she’d screamed her throat raw and could barely talk anymore, and she’d stopped shaking the bars because she had broken, bleeding blisters on both hands. After that she’d spent her time exploring her cell.
There were three concrete walls around her and prison bars in front, with a locked door. There were bunks attached to the walls on either side with chains. Two high, two low. Four beds total. There were a toilet and sink on the back wall. The water worked. There was a box under the bottom bunk on the right with a few supplies. Someone had used duct tape to drape a vinyl shower curtain in front of the toilet. It smelled new. Everything else about the place had a damp, musty smell to it. It was cool enough to make her grateful she’d been wearing a sweater.
Her captor had thrown her into the cage after a long drive. She’d lost her cell phone. She’d only realized it when he had searched her—thoroughly—while she’d still been tied up. Then he’d finally dragged her to the bars and stuck her hands through, holding them there while he went outside and closed the door with a frightening bang.
From there he’d cut the zip ties from her wrists. As soon as they were free she jerked away from him, yanked the tape from her mouth and started calling him names and demanding to be let go, and screaming and swearing. But a few minutes later she’d realized he was gone.
Her possessions were few. There were a plastic water pitcher and a few plastic glasses. Spoons but no forks. Washcloths. There were a roll of toilet paper, a tangle of brushes and three wrapped bars of soap in addition to the new bar that sat on the sink. There was a single blanket on each of the bunks. And that was it.
Every few hours he brought her something to eat. Protein bars, a bag of chips, a piece of fruit. Never a meal. Just snacks. At first she’d refused to eat, figuring the food might be drugged. Then when the hunger got bad, she decided she had nothing to lose. She was a prisoner. How could being a drugged prisoner be any worse?
She had no sense of time and no real idea how long she’d been there when she heard the door open and jumped off the bunk, lunging toward the sound in desperation, only to bang hard into a person and fall on the hard floor as the door clanged closed again. Scrambling to her feet, she shouted and threw herself at the bars, grabbing and shaking them, and swearing at her captor.
But there were only retreating footsteps.
And the knowledge that she wasn’t alone anymore. There was someone in here with her, sitting on the floor now, making muffled but urgent sounds.
She turned toward the sounds, knew there were tears streaming down her own face, and felt horribly guilty for hoping it was another captive like her. “All right, all right. I’m coming.” Holding her hands out in front of her, Stevie moved slowly closer, until her hands bumped against a head. She turned her palms inward, running them lower, down the sides of a face, and felt the blindfold around the eyes, the tape over the mouth, and then lower, as the poor thing sat perfectly still, shivering. It was a girl. Had to be a girl. Stevie got to the hands, zip-tied together behind her back. The Asshole, as she’d taken to thinking of the kidnapper, had cut the zip tie partway through. She bent it back and forth until it gave and the newcomer’s hands pulled free.
The girl whipped them around fast, and Stevie stepped backward, waiting for her to remove the tape herself. “What the fuck is this?”
Stevie said, “I don’t know. I’ve been here... I don’t know, a couple of days, maybe.”
“Bullshit. This is bullshit.” The other girl went to the bars, and just as Stevie had done when she’d arrived, she shook and screamed and pounded and pulled. She didn’t beg or cry the way Stevie had. She sounded strong, sure of herself, confident. Everything Stevie wasn’t.
Eventually she stopped fighting the useless door, and paced the cell instead, back and forth.
Stevie was sitting on the bottom bunk hugging her sweater around her and waiting until it felt like time to talk. Eventually she tried. “My name’s Stevie. Um, Stephanie.”
The pacing stopped. She felt the girl looking at her. Eventually she said, “Lexus.”
Stevie nodded. “How did you get here?”
“Fucker grabbed me right off the damn street is how I got here. Threw me in a van, tied me up and tossed me here.” She shuffled a little. “You?”
“Same.”
