Drawn Into Darkness (3 page)

“Tighter, Justin,” Stoat said.

I tilted my head and tried to look at Justin as he tied the rope to the bedpost, but he wouldn't meet my eyes. As soon as he'd completed the job, he left the room.

“You,” Stoat said, gesturing at me with the gun, “what's your name again? Lee Anna something?”

I nodded, afraid that if I tried to speak, I would burst into pleas or tears.

“Now, Lee Anna, listen. You shouldn't have come here to my house. You put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. So now I got to keep you here till I figure out what to do about you. But I want you to understand I'm a logical man and I don't hurt people for no reason. You just lay still and—is that your dog yapping?”

Sure enough, in this bedroom away from the air conditioner I could hear Schweitzer steadily barking.

My mouth opened on its own. “He needs to be fed,” I whispered. “Key to the house is in my pocket.”

“I already got it.” He held it up for me to see, the house key dangling from its Hello Kitty ring. “Dog needs to be fed, huh?”

“Please,” I said.

Justin came back in carrying a grungy white pillowcase. Stoat stuck his gun into the front waistband of his cutoff jeans and, just as I began to exhale in relief, he pulled something out of a pocket and snapped it open into a vicious-looking knife. That's subjective. If I had seen the knife in a display case at a sporting goods store, I might have regarded it simply as a rather large folding army-style survival knife with a four-inch blade. But in the hand of—I couldn't yet face what Stoat really was—in his hand it terrified me, slashing through the pillowcase as if it were tissue. When he was done with the knife, he made a casual move so fast I didn't comprehend it until I saw the knife quivering with its dagger point stuck into the wall on the other side of the bed.

The man had thrown the knife right over top of me, just like that, zing. He was a knife thrower. Oh, great. Just wonderful.

He knotted the strip of cloth in his hands—those hands looked overlarge, ugly-knuckled, and very strong to me—and then he leaned over me.

“What's that?” I gasped.

He growled, “I don't like noise,” as he none too gently tied it around my head.

“But I won't scream,” I tried to protest, or promise. “There's nobody around to hear me anyway.”

“I'm a careful man. Open up.” He forced the knot into my mouth, then tightened everything, ending my side of the conversation. “I like things neat,” he told me sourly, “and you have sure messed things up for me.” Then he walked over, yanked his knife out of the wall, waved it at me with no expression at all on his crater face, and left.

I suppose it's odd, considering my situation, but I felt great relief when he left the room. Listening, I followed his footsteps to the front door, where it sounded like he went out of the shack. A moment later I heard an engine cough into reluctant life. The van I had seen parked at the side of the house.

Good. Good, this Stoat man was going to feed Schweitzer.

Lying on a bare mattress and looking at a boring, cheaply tiled ceiling, I tried to come to grips, listening to Schweitzer bark and considering my new reality one aspect at a time. Daylight came in through two windows, but from where I lay, I could see nothing but treetops through either of them. My head hurt and I felt something sticky on my face and neck. Beer. Beer bottle. Couldn't have injured me too badly if I remembered what had hit me. Raising two sons, I had learned all about concussions. I didn't have one. And I had not been raped. Yet. One out of every four women is raped sometime in her life. If the posts around me were women, which one would have been raped? But what an unseemly thought about such a decorous bed, an antique four-poster, unusual for this kind of shack. Had the man Stoat acquired it on purpose for—for . . .

For Justin?

My thoughts, frightened, issued a gag order in a hurry. Back off. Justin was still alive after two years, I told myself. Stoat had kept him alive. Maybe Stoat would keep me alive. And Schweitzer. Stoat was going to feed Schweitzer. In fact, I could tell he had reached the door of my fuchsia shack, because I heard Schweitzer launch into a crescendo of barking—

And then an innocuous popping sound and a sickening scream, like nothing I had ever heard before, not human. Two more pops, then silence.

It took me a few heartbeats to get it.

The gun. Oh, my God, the gun.

“No!” I cried, or tried to cry out; with the knot of cloth in my mouth I managed only a muffled, distorted yawp. Frantically I thrashed against what must have been handcuffs around my wrists and ankles, trying to rip myself loose and run to my dog, for all the good that would do. Behind the gag of denial in my mind, I knew that Schweitzer, my “reverence for life” dog, lay bloody and dying. Yanking harder, I felt my restraints cut my skin; now I was bleeding too.

Justin came running in. “Stop it!” he exclaimed with no threat in his voice; he sounded frightened. Grabbing my shoulders to hold me down, his face hovering over mine, he begged, “Stop it, ma'am. Fighting only makes it worse. Believe me.”

I looked up at him, and as if what had happened to Schweitzer were not bad enough, I saw something unspeakable shadowing his eyes. There was nothing blank about this boy. I stopped struggling, but my body still heaved, now with hurtful sobs. My ribs and belly ached, I cried so hard.

“I'm sorry,” Justin said, “I'm sorry,” as if it were all his fault. “Lie still.” He disappeared someplace and came back with a box of tissues plus a moistened washcloth. Sitting on the edge of my bed, he wiped snot and tears from my face, pulled the knotted gag out of my mouth and tucked it under my chin, then helped me blow my nose. “Please try to calm down before Uncle Steve gets back,” he urged, folding the washcloth to lay its cool, clean side on my forehead. “I have no idea what he'll do if you cry. He hates women.”

That statement instantly stopped my bawling. It made a soldier of me. I am woman, hear me roar. I stared up at Justin. “He's not your uncle,” I stated with barely a quiver in my voice.

“I've got to call him that.”

“You're not a woman, but I bet he likes to make you cry too.”

Justin did not reply except with shifting eyes. With a fresh tissue he swabbed my face like the deck of a storm-drenched ship.

I said, “Justin, what about your mother? Do you want her to keep crying?”

“Don't talk about my mother.”

“Why are you still here? Your family wants you back. What are you waiting for?”

He shook his head, stood up, and went to look out a window toward my house. Then he disappeared into some other part of the shack and came back again with a roll of gauze. Moving quickly, he started wrapping my ankle where the handcuffs—I couldn't see the handcuffs, but that's what the metal things had to be—where they had cut and bloodied me.

“Justin—” I started to question him again.

“Don't talk.” He shoved the gag back into my mouth. “I have to hurry and do this.”

He had finished my ankles and was starting on one wrist when we heard the door open. I stiffened. Justin kept on wrapping gauze. I heard footsteps stop at the bedroom door. Stoat demanded, “Whatcha doing that for?”

“You want her to bleed all over the mattress?” Justin's soft, husky voice made this retort sound peaceable enough.

I could not see Stoat and did not want to look at him, but I imagined he'd decided in Justin's favor during a long, silent moment. He gave a raspy laugh. “She threw a fit when I shot her dog, huh?”

“Yes, sir,” Justin said tonelessly, bandaging my other wrist.

“Well, I didn't do it out of meanness. You know that. She should know that. It was the only sensible way to take care of the dog, what with him yapping all the time till somebody might notice.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And if the damn dog would have stood still, it would only have taken one shot.”

“Yes, sir.” Justin finished my wrist and stood up.

Stoat told him, “Now get out of here, and I don't want you in here with her. I'll take care of her.”

Sure, he would, I thought, forced to face it now. Same way he took care of Schweitzer.

I just wondered how soon.

B
y nightfall I almost did not care how soon. My back ached atrociously, and when I tried to ease my joints—hip, knee, elbow—the metal bit into my wrists and ankles. It would have hurt much worse if Justin hadn't wrapped them, but it still hurt some. And I had to keep flexing my feet and hands because even in the subtropical heat I felt them going cold and numb, losing blood circulation. Maybe because I couldn't move, or maybe because I was so scared. I had to be strong, I coached myself. Take care of myself. Flex my muscles, keep myself ready to move, watch my thoughts.

Trying to be more bored than frightened, I examined the perforated white tiles—what were those things made of, anyway, Styrofoam?—and I tried to see patterns in the squares on the ceiling. And in the overhead light fixture, but it was just the usual two bulbs covered with a frosted-glass square bug-catcher. The hermaphroditic positioning of the lightbulbs gave me mental fodder for a few moments but nothing uplifting. I felt my backache getting worse, plus discomfort from pressure points on the mattress; I began to understand how people got bedsores, and I badly wished somebody had thrown a blanket over me, covering me, if only for psychological comfort. But I didn't make a sound. Didn't want Stoat's company. Neither he nor Justin—what was Justin's real last name? My memory had dropped it somewhere between here and the living room. Anyhow, neither of them came near me. I smelled macaroni and cheese, supper, but nobody offered me any, which made me feel starved and abused even though my knotted stomach would not possibly have let me eat it. When I thought divorce was the best way to lose weight quickly, I was wrong. Being a prisoner in fear of one's life looked even more effective.

And hopeless. Nobody was going to miss me or rescue me, least of all my family. My parents and I were barely speaking. My ex had no reason to want to phone me. My sons would not call, and it might take them a month or more to start worrying about me. I had two older brothers who kept in touch sporadically and might call if the spirit moved them, but I couldn't count on it. I had not yet met anybody down here who gave a damn, just dollar store and grocery store clerks. My friends from up north might call, leaving messages on my voice mail, and get pissed at me when I didn't call back. Nobody would come to my little fuchsia home to check on me.

Like my thoughts, the room darkened—nightfall—but my eyes stayed open.

The overhead light fixture flicked on.

I think my whole body winced like my startled eyes. Reflexively I turned my head. By the bed stood Stoat with his big pistol and his goatee, which did nothing for his undistinguished profile, just made him look like a goat. Stoat the Goat, that was what I would call him, although not to his face.

As I thought this, as if he were psychic and heard me, he turned to glare, pointing the pistol at me as Justin went around the bed releasing my wrists and ankles. Of their own accord, my arms and legs curled toward my midsection like those of a squashed spider.

“Get up,” Stoat ordered, gesturing with the gun. “Potty time.”

I realized I should have been afraid it was more than just potty time, but my mind had gone as numb as my toes. Awkwardly I swung my legs over the side of the bed to sit.

“The gag?” Justin asked.

“Yeah, take it off. Let her spit and get a drink.”

I felt Justin fumbling at the back of my head to untie the thing. Maybe he didn't want his darling Uncle Steve to realize he could slip it in and out of my mouth. Finally he removed it.

“Stand up,” ordered Stoat the Goat.

Clenching my teeth against the pain and stiffness in my lower back, I tottered to my unreliable feet.

“Move.” Stoat nudged me in the ribs with the gun barrel.

I stepped out of the room and toward the back of the house as directed, and my brain got going also, starting to try to think. Escape. How? Bathroom window? Surely Stoat wouldn't come in there with me?

He didn't, but the bathroom offered no back exit. Its window was boarded up, and not just with plywood either. Two-by-fours. And not from the inside. Not so that the boards could be levered up, pried off, nails pulled out. They completely covered the window glass and screen from the outside. I saw not even a knothole to peek through.

This place had been altered to serve as a prison long before I came along.

“Hurry up!” yelled Stoat.

I decided to stall him as long as I could. Get my arms and legs back to life. “I need to wash,” I called back. “There's beer all—”

All over me, I was going to say, but a loud bang interrupted me. The gun. Aimed low, the bullet ricocheted off the base of the toilet and zinged around the bathroom, so fast it was over by the time I jumped and screamed.

“Just pee in the damn pot,” Stoat said with patience that menaced worse than a shower of obscenities. If the man didn't mind putting a bullet hole in his bathroom door, he wouldn't mind kicking it in either.

I had peed, but not in the pot. Unfortunately, the bathroom was as obsessively tidy as the rest of the house. Using toilet paper, I cleaned up myself first, then started on the floor.

“What's taking so long!”

“Almost finished.” I flushed the toilet I had not even sat on, ran water as if washing my hands (or maybe getting a drink and spitting), said “Oops” as if I had splashed myself, stalled by spraying with raspberry Glade, then discovered I could not take the next step. I could not open the door.

“I'm scared to come out,” I said.

“You come out or I won't shoot low this time.”

It's amazing how brave terror can make a person. I opened the door and stepped out. Justin was nowhere to be seen. Stoat motioned me back to my room and onto the bed with his oversized pistol. “Justin!” he hollered, and the kid came in and cuffed my wrists and ankles without looking at me. Stoat nodded and stuffed his weapon all too appropriately into the front waistband of his pants.

“Okay. Bedtime. Nighty-night, sleep tight,” he said, and I thought he was tormenting me, but there was a sort of genuine warmth, maybe eagerness, in his tone, and he put his arm around Justin, pulled him close, and kissed him on the lips.

I gasped in shock. This was probably what Stoat wanted, because he looked straight into my horrified eyes and grinned. Justin's face, what I could see of it, had gone crimson, and he kept his head turned against Stoat's shoulder.

With his arm still around the boy, Stoat left the room and flicked off the light.

When people say they spent a sleepless night, usually they're exaggerating. Usually they have at least dozed a little.

I spent a sleepless night, no exaggeration. The dark hours became one long panic attack. My heart raced, and my mind, and I ached all over with sheer helplessness.

But I, myself, was not the only one I felt helpless about.

Of course I felt terribly afraid as the captive of a psycho. I didn't want to die. I needed to escape. But even more urgently I needed to rescue Justin.

•   •   •

Sometime in the dead of night—that's what they call it, the dead of night, uncomfortable thought—I thought I heard stealthy movements somewhere in the house. Holding my breath to listen, despite the blathering of summer insects all around the shack, that plus the pounding of my own pulse in my ears, I sensed someone was awake and up to something. Stoat, probably, paying me a visit to—rape me, kill me, the devil knew what. I would be too proud to cry out, but he would make me cry out anyway. Unmistakable soft footsteps approached my room. I tried to lie still and not tremble—

It was Justin.

I knew it the moment he reached the door, even though I could barely see a thing, with only a whisper of starlight coming in the windows. Maybe I recognized him from that awkward, ardent pubescent-boy smell I knew so well from my sons, a whisper of scent just at the edge of my conscious awareness. Or maybe my primal mothering instinct knew him, or maybe there is a sixth sense. Somehow I could tell that the shadow entering my room was youthful, frightened, and wretched and brave, trying to—atone?

He sat on the edge of the bed—I felt the mattress sag—and he fumbled at my face to find the gag and pull it out of my mouth. “Shhh,” he told me in the softest of exhalations, and he reached for something and fumbled again to find my mouth, pressing what felt like wood shavings against my lips. But my nose told me otherwise. Cornflakes. I opened my mouth.

The cornflakes tasted sugary. Frosted Flakes. When I had chewed and swallowed, I opened my mouth again, waiting like a baby bird for Justin to feed me.

After a short while, however, my stomach started to rebel, and I closed my mouth, turned away, and shook my head.

“Eat,” Justin whispered so softly I could barely hear him.

“Can't,” I whispered back.

“Drink?” he asked. “Milk?”

I knew I should try to stay strong and hydrated. “Okay.”

He slipped one hand under my head and lifted it in the cradle of his elbow. With the other hand he guided a glass to my mouth, tilting it until I tasted milk. I sipped a few swallows of it, then pulled away.

He took the hint, laying my head back on the mattress. “How about some more cereal?”

“No, thanks.”

As if I might change my mind in a few moments, he stayed where he was.

“Go back to bed,” I whispered, “before that pervert wakes up and wonders where you are. He makes you sleep with him, doesn't he?”

Justin might have nodded, but I couldn't tell. I felt his body sag heavy on the mattress, saw him, or the dark shape that was him, curl up and slump over.

“Better go,” I breathed.

Without a good-bye he got up and left me.

I looked up into darkness and tears ran down across my temples and trickled into my ears. My stomach hurt, trying to process food amid bile and stress, but that wasn't the cause of my tears. Nothing Stoat could do to me would ever make me weep; I promised myself that. I had a great deal of useless pride, even after the divorce had flattened me. Especially then. But Justin and a few Frosted Flakes made me want to bawl like a baby.

I shied away from thinking the word “kindness.” It was treacherous. Even Stoat could be kind.

He demonstrated that in the morning. Striding into my room—my prison—he said, “Hey, there,” just like a truly nice guy, pulled the gag out of my mouth, and asked without a hint of sarcasm, “Did you sleep well?”

His gently smiling face astonished me so much that instead of glaring at him, I gawked.

“You ain't speaking to me?” His smile waxed even more saintly. “I can understand that. Come on and use the bathroom.” He released my feet first, and I could have kicked him in the head, but I just stared. After he released my hands, he did draw his omnipresent handgun from his waistband as I struggled to get up from the bed, but he stood back and gave me all the time in the world to get my stiffened body up and walking.

Oddly, his unexpected patience made me more afraid of him, not less. In the bathroom, even after I had pulled my pants back up, I still felt trembly all over. I took my time washing my hands and trying to finger-comb my hair, at which point I realized I had somehow become reluctant to look at myself in the mirror. I could not meet my own eyes.

I could not bear to see my own terror, I told myself. But then I realized I was rationalizing what was really—shame? Of all the stupid—what did I have to be ashamed of? I had done nothing to be ashamed of.

Yet facing the mirror and the look in my own eyes forced me to acknowledge damage beneath the skin. Physically, Stoat had not hurt me much—yet—but already I had been crippled. Stoat was in the process of diminishing my selfhood, taking away my spirit, reducing me to a joyless middle-aged child who was dependent upon him for life itself.

This was not good. He must not see it in me.

I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself straight in the eye until I had to lift my chin and grin.

From right outside the doorway Stoat demanded, “What the hell is taking you so long?”

I let go of the grin but tried to keep my chin up as I went out to face him.

“Feeling better?” he asked viciously. Yet his gun barrel motioned me not back toward the bed but in another direction, and I found myself entering a small kitchen that seemed a lot like the rest of the house, everything orderly, everything impeccable, everything cheap and without character. “Have a seat,” he said as we approached the generic tube-legged table topped with scrub-worn Formica. “I always say the key to a good day is a proper breakfast.”

Good day?

Again he seemed absurdly serious. Justin, manning the stove, served up toast, fried Spam, and scrambled eggs without letting me meet his eyes.

“Eat up, Lee Anna. Enjoy it,” said Stoat sincerely, almost compassionately, laying his revolver on the corner of the table beside him. Well out of my reach.

Because I wanted to stay on the tube-legs-and-plastic-seat chair, as opposed to the much more formidable bed, I did manage to eat. Slowly, but Stoat seemed all patience and goodwill this morning.

“Justin, you gotta stay home from school today, boy. One look at your face, people will be asking who pissed on your Cheerios.”

School? Right, it was Monday, but—but normally Justin went to
school
? Why hadn't he told a teacher he was abducted? Why hadn't he contacted his parents?

Justin looked at Stoat and whispered, “You
gotta
go to work?” as if he was scared of being left home alone with me.

“Yes, boy, I gotta go to work because it's spring break down in Panama City, the T-shirts are flying off the shelves, and if I don't show, my ass is grass and my boss is the lawn mower.” He grinned at his own trashy wit. Justin tried for a smile, appearing anxious to please, but Stoat leaned back, crossed his arms, and studied the boy. Then, to my unpleasant surprise, he turned to me.