Finding Claire Fletcher (29 page)

She looked sad. I had no idea how long she’d been standing there. When she spoke, her voice held none of its usual malevolence. It was hollow and flat.

“Now you’ve really done it,” she said.

Tiffany walked into the kitchen and gasped when the circle of light illuminated the full injury of my face.

“Wow,” she said.

“Get me out of here,” I said.

She put her hands on her hips and stared at me. Her face was slack and all the more disturbing because it was not twisted in the sneer that she usually directed toward me.

“Come on,” I said, pulling at the chains and offering my hands up to her as if in prayer.

She ignored me, sitting on the floor in front of me and folding her legs into a triangle, bony knees jutting out from her shorts. As if we were two teenage girls at a slumber party, sharing secrets atop a sleeping bag in the middle of the night.

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “I don’t understand you. You always want to get away, but you never leave. He’s obsessed with you. No matter what I do, it’s not good enough. It’s never good enough. You treat him like shit, and he still has to know everything you do, every place you go.”

She picked at the hem of her shorts, face bent downward, and her thin brown hair falling across her cheek. “I thought it would be so great after you left, and it was for a while. Then he started going out more and staying out overnight. He told me he didn’t mess around with other girls but still, it seemed like he never wanted to be with me. We still had sex all the time, well, at least till last year. Now he hardly touches me. It’s like I’m ugly or something.”

“Tiffany,” I said. “Listen to me. You have to get me out of these chains.”

She looked at me, and her eyes were sorrowful. “Why should I? You ruin everything. You’ve totally ruined everything after tonight.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “He’s angry. He’ll get over it like he always does and the two of you can go back to doing, oh I don’t know, whatever sick, bizarre things you do over there. But you have to get me out of here right now. He’s going to do something bad. He’s going to hurt someone I care about if I don’t stop him.”

Her face pinched. “See? You don’t care about me. All you can think of is yourself. You’re not even listening to me. No one listens to me. You don’t care how I feel.” She said the word feel as if it were the first time she’d uttered it. It peeled off her tongue like a foreign word.

“I do listen to you,” I said. “You think he cares about you but he doesn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t have made you his sex toy when you were only thirteen. Someone somewhere cares about you, about how you feel, but it’s not him.”

Her eyes flashed; a familiar emotion in the flatland of her face. “You’re wrong,” she snapped. “He’s the only one who ever cared about me. You think my mom cared about me? You think those stupid social workers cared about me? You think my grandparents or those snotty people at that dumb old church cared about me? No one did. No one gave a shit about me until he came along. Now everything is ruined.”

I moaned. “Fine. Fine. Whatever. But it’s not ruined. Look, he’s held onto me this long, do you really think he’s going to send you packing too? Just get me out of these chains. I have to stop him.”

Again, the flat quiet settled over her. She resumed picking the thread from the hem of her shorts. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what I do. He’ll keep you or he wouldn’t have chained you up. So what if you go after him. That’s probably what he wants. But he doesn’t care about me anymore.”

I struggled with the words, not wanting to say them but seeing no other way to coax her to help me get free. “Yes, he does. Of course, he does. Don’t say that. Just help me out of here.”

Again, I offered my hands in supplication. “No, he doesn’t,” she said, more sharply. “He’s already got someone else.”

All the throbbing stabbing pain in my body was sucked into a single point in my stomach, like a whirlpool pulling it down to some dark place I never wanted to see again. “What?” I croaked.

“He brought her home a few weeks ago. I didn’t know she was in there right away until I realized he’d started locking the door. I only saw her once. I don’t know why he likes her. She’s small, and she doesn’t even talk. All she does is cry all the time. She’s a big stupid baby.”

On my hands and knees, I crawled as close to her as the chain would allow. My voice held a new intensity, desperation. “Tiffany,” I said. “You have to help me get out of here. Now.”

She shook her head.

“Please,” I said. “This is very, very important.”

Again, she shook her head.

Then, an idea. “I’ll take her away,” I said. “Help me get out of here and I’ll take her away and she’ll never come back.”

“Yeah right,” she mumbled. “Then he’ll just be mad at me even more cause I let you go. Forget it. I wish you would go away.”

“I will. Let me go and I will. I’ll go away, so far away you won’t be able to find me and you’ll never see me again.”

“No way,” she said. “Like I would believe anything you said. You’re a big fat liar.”

She sat, staring at the floor, slowly unthreading her shorts. I resumed my struggle with the chains, gasping, squirming, pushing, pulling and nearly screaming with frustration. When I was spent once more and the pain in my ribs had become too much, I stopped and faced her again.

I watched her for a long time, my mind working through countless words I could use to convince her to help me. I shifted to the side and rested my back against the side of one of the benches. I tried to even out my breathing.

“Could you at least get me some ice?” I said. “For my face.”

She looked at me and then rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said.

She went to the freezer and took out a tray of ice cubes, which she dumped into a kitchen towel. She gathered the ends of the towel up in one hand and brought it to me. She held it out. I took it with both hands and pressed it to the side of my face. She took up her position across from me once more.

After several minutes, I held the makeshift ice pack out to her. “Could you hold it on my face for a while? It hurts when I keep my arms up like that. I think he broke some of my ribs.”

She rolled her eyes again but shimmied over and took the ice pack from me. As she reached up to press it to my face, I swung my arms over her head and looped the chain around her throat. I pulled her into me with both hands and the chain tightened, its length fully expended. She choked and spluttered. Her hands flew to her neck and dug into the skin above and below the heavy links of metal. Her legs shot straight out.

I steeled myself against the awesome pain in my ribs, pulling and pulling until she slackened a little. I loosened the chain slightly, and her breath emerged in small bursts of air.

Into her ear, I hissed. “Now you listen to me. You’re going to get me out of these chains or I am going to kill you. I’m going across the street, I’m taking that girl, leaving with her, and you aren’t going to say a fucking word. Do you understand?”

She gave no indication so I jerked furiously on the chain. This time her back arched, and her body danced helplessly, like a branch caught in a storm. After several seconds I released again, allowing her to breathe. Still, she clutched at her neck.

“You think I won’t kill you? You think I don’t have it in me? Well, I do. I’ll pull this chain until all the breath is squeezed out of you. I’ll keep pulling until you suffocate. Did you know it only takes four minutes for a girl like you to asphyxiate and die? I learned that from him.”

With my last words, her body seized again, as if I had pulled the chain tight across her windpipe once more.

“That’s right,” I said. “I watched him do it to someone just like you. If you think for one second that I won’t do the same to you, you’re dead wrong. You will get me out of these chains and you will let me go—with the girl.”

Nothing. I began to tighten the chain again, but then she began nodding furiously. I let go but did not remove the chain from her neck. She turned on her side, coughing and choking into my lap. Tears leaked from her eyes onto my pants, and a long thread of spittle dripped from her mouth. She rubbed her throat.

I jangled the chain. “Are you going to help me?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice throaty and raspy. “Yes. Yes. Just stop.”

“Do you have the keys?”

She shook her head, and I gripped the chain again. “No. Wait,” she breathed. “He took them with him. But I can do something. I don’t know…something.”

The effort of speaking wore her out. I glanced at the padlock. “Get a hammer,” I said. “Do you have a hammer?”

She nodded.

“Go,” I said.

Stumbling, her legs not working quite right, she ran from the trailer. Minutes later she returned, breathless, wielding a hammer, its head rusted over with age. I pointed below the table with both hands. “The padlock,” I said.

She dropped to her knees, ducking her head under the table and made several feeble attempts to smash the lock. “Give me that,” I said, pushing her aside. She dropped the hammer on the floor and moved out of my way. She sat with her back against the opposite bench, kneading the skin at her throat and breathing irregularly.

I put my legs on either side of the column and gripped the handle of the hammer with both hands. I could not raise it above my head for momentum because of the table, although it would probably have hurt far too much to do so anyway. I swung as hard as I could. I swung again and again until sweat poured down my ruined face, burning my eyes. The hammer clanged angrily against the lock and the column. As it started to mangle, I increased my efforts, adrenaline dulling the pain in my body.

Finally, it broke loose. I scurried out from under the table and tossed the hammer into Tiffany’s lap. She jumped, and her eyes widened at the sight of me. I flattened my palms against the floor, pulling the small chain between the cuffs taut.

“You have to break this,” I said. “I can’t drive like this.”

She stared at me blankly.

“Tiffany,” I said. I reached up and pushed the hammer against her thin chest. “Goddammit. Right now.”

She took the hammer, and I flattened my palms again. “Aim for the center of the chain,” I instructed.

She raised the hammer to face level and brought it down with a dull thud. I looked up at her. “You’re going to have to go harder than that,” I said. “Come on, I don’t have much time.”

After several half-hearted tries, she began to bring the hammer down hard, its impact on the chain making a high-pitched ping. Then she swung a little wildly and hit my left hand. I howled in pain, and she backed away as if I might attack her. I put my hands back on the floor. The throbbing had to wait. “Again,” I said. “Use the other end.”

She turned the hammer over so the pick end faced downward. As she raised it above her head, I said, “Do not hit me again.”

It took three tries, and the small chain broke. I bolted to my feet, toward the door. I fell down the three front steps of the trailer, swearing and kicking up gravel and dirt as I stood again. Tiffany watched dumbly from the doorway. I held my left hand in my right as I made my best attempt at a sprint across the road toward the house.

I barreled through the front door using only my shoulder, again falling on the hardwood floor and scrambling back to my feet. I searched the rooms until I came to the locked door. This, too, was padlocked.

“Son of a bitch.” I turned to see Tiffany watching me. “Go get the hammer,” I said.

Wordlessly, she left. I began kicking at the door with as much force as my injured body could muster, which was not much. Even given the age of the house and poor quality of the door, my kicks were ineffective. Tiffany returned and held out the hammer. I took it in my right hand. I tried to wrap my left hand around it, but my hand had gone almost completely limp. With my right hand I swung downward, driving the hammer into the lock and grunting with my efforts. Finally, the lock fell to the floor with a clang.

With my foot, I pushed the door open.

Connor opened his eyes to darkness. For a moment, he thought he was dreaming. Then he wondered why he didn’t remember going to bed. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he realized he was on the floor of his bedroom, and then it came back to him. Not that it was very much. He knew he’d been hit on the head, mostly because it hurt so damn much.

He reached up to touch his head and saw that his hands were bound together with heavy rope. He felt a thick, sloppy fluid matting his hair. Blood. He winced as he ran his fingers clumsily along the gash. He lifted his head but saw nothing but the dark, familiar shapes of his bedroom. His feet were bound as well. He pulled his feet up toward his head and tried to untie the rope.

He sensed rather than saw the black figure flying at him from his left side. Instinctively, he rolled away and a heavy foot landed in his back. He rolled back and grabbed the figure’s foot, sweeping the man down to the floor with him. He pulled on the leg and squirmed toward the man, trying to get on top of him. Another foot hit Connor in the shoulder.

The man was on top of Connor, on his knees, fists raised high above his head. Connor covered his face and took most of the blows on his forearms as he planted his bound feet on the floor and lifted his rear end to buck the man off. As the attacker toppled to the side, Connor reached above his head. He knew the bed was there, and he hoped he was in position to grab the knife he’d stowed.