Last to Die: A gripping psychological thriller not for the faint hearted (18 page)

C
aleb climbed
out of the car and stretched. His lower back was stiff and his legs ached. It had been a long drive from Rockville, but now that he was at the cabin he could unwind and shake off some of the fatigue.

He checked the perimeter of the cabin to be sure it remained undisturbed. Satisfied no one had been snooping around, he unlocked the front door and stepped inside the main room. He lit two kerosene lamps, deposited his bag in the metal trunk and returned to the car, carrying one of the lamps loosely in his hand.

He unlocked the truck, unsurprised to find her staring up at him. He lifted the lamp and ran it over her. She shrank from the light and made a whimpering sound behind the tape.

They all did that.

He grabbed her and hauled her out. He cut the plastic cables that bound her feet and shoved her in the direction he wanted her to go. She stumbled in the dark, but remained upright.

‘Walk,’ he said.

She walked.

He directed her towards a barn to the rear of the cabin. As he unlocked the doors she made more muffled sounds from behind the gag. He ignored this, disinterested in what she was trying to say. He had a fair idea what it was. He was pretty sure he had heard it all before. He pushed her inside and shut the door behind them.

‘Stand still.’

She complied immediately. He hooked the lamp onto a beam and lifted a trap door set into the floor a few feet inside the barn. When she saw what he was doing she backed away, keening in her throat with fear.

‘Get in there.’

She shook her head and folded in on herself. He advanced on her and grabbed her arm. She threw herself to the ground with surprising force. When Caleb reached to grab her again she drew her feet up to her chest and kicked out at him. Unfortunately for her, the range was too short to cause any real damage and he knocked her legs out of the way with a snort of amusement. He grabbed her by the legs, flipped her over onto her stomach and dragged her across the floor by her ankles. He paused at the trap door and flung her down the steps.

Caleb took the lamp from the hook and followed her down below. She was groaning, confused. He unlocked the door she had collided with and dragged her by the back of her shirt into a small room no bigger than a prison cell.

He attached the lamp to another hook set into the wall. Jessie sat up a little and looked around her. There was a fold-down bed against one wall and a metal toilet and hand basin, like the kind you’d find on a train, by the other. The floor was compacted dirt, and that was all that was in there.

He caught Jessie around her waist and lifted her onto the bed. He took a knife from a sheath wrapped around his ankle and sliced through the binds at her wrists. He flipped her over and ripped the tape from her mouth so fast tiny pricks of blood appeared on her upper lip where her skin had come away with the tape.

‘Please don’t hurt me.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Please, what do you—’

He slapped her across the face hard, snapping her head to one side.

‘I said it once already.’

She was silent. Caleb grabbed the lamp. He held it aloft with one hand while he grabbed her face with the other. He turned it this way and that, his fingers vice-like against her skin. There was a splinter in her cheek from the wooden steps and blood on her face. He read fear in her eyes but something else, too. Something he recognised as easily as he recognised water; total and utter hatred. He released her and took a step backwards.

‘You can drink the water from the sink. It tastes funny. It won’t kill you, but it tastes funny. Do you understand me?’

Jessie nodded.

‘Good, this is where we’re at. I’m going up top now. I’m tired and I need to rest up.’

‘Please, oh please don’t … don’t leave me down here.’

‘You need to rest up.’ He narrowed his eyes and scratched at the bridge of his nose with his thumb. ‘I want you fresh, no point running you like this. No point at all.’

She came off the bed at speed and grabbed the front of his shirt. ‘If you let me go I swear I won’t tell anyone, I swear to you I won’t mention you to a soul.’

Caleb grabbed her hands and pushed her back, irritated. ‘That’s stupid. You got any idea how stupid that sounds? Do you think I’m stupid?’

‘No, I—’

‘So don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.’

‘I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry. I … I don’t think you’re stupid.’

‘Good, ’cause I ain’t.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I reckon you’ll be a pretty good one.’

Jessie blinked in confusion. ‘I don’t understand … a good one?’

But he was no longer interested in talking. He was tired and he needed to rest. He turned towards the door.

She was on him before he had laid his hand on the door, throwing her weight onto his back, trying to force her way past him. He shrugged her off, spun, grabbed her by the throat and smashed her into the wall as hard as he could. She grunted and scrabbled at his hand, trying to pry his fingers loose.

He squeezed until she slackened then released her. She slid down the wall with her eyes rolling every which way in her head. He was worried for a moment about her windpipe, but then she took a breath, and then another, and slowly her eyes refocused. She raised her hand to her throat, leaned over and coughed until she retched.

‘You ain’t damaged,’ Caleb said and left the cell. He locked the door and left her alone, weeping in the darkness.

W
hen Jessie hadn’t made
contact by dawn on Sunday, Mike phoned Fay to let her know what the situation was and then he called the law. Twenty-five minutes after he made the calls, Sheriff Earl Dubray and Fay arrived at his home, almost simultaneously. Mike was on the porch, waiting. He stood and invited both of them inside, offered fresh coffee, which they both accepted, and explained what was going on without interruption. When he was finished talking he lit a cigarette and leaned against the countertop, his face strained, his entire body tilted with exhaustion.

‘Any chance she’s gone to visit friends?’ Earl said, adding three lumps of sugar to his coffee. ‘Is that possible?’

‘I don’t think you understand me, Earl,’ Mike said. ‘Jessie wouldn’t up and do something like that. Something has to have happened to her.’

‘Look, Mike, I appreciate that you are concerned—’

‘Damn right I’m concerned. It’s Sunday morning and nobody has heard from Jessie since Friday. Wouldn’t you be concerned?’

‘You say she took the dog with her?’

‘I said the dog is gone,’ Mike corrected him.

‘You reckon she’s been gone since Friday, so how come you’re only calling me in now?’

Mike glanced down at his boots for a second. ‘I thought maybe she was mad at me.’

‘For what?’

‘For none of your damned business.’

‘Mike,’ Fay said.

‘Things going okay between y’all?’

‘You read the papers don’t you, Earl?’

Earl blew on his coffee and took a sip. A strong-willed, capable man, his face took on a look Mike recognised from their school days, a look that said only Earl’s professional courtesy kept him from saying whatever thought had flown through his mind.

‘I read them, doesn’t mean I believe every word printed in them.’ Earl laid a thick brown forearm on the table. ‘I need to ask questions, Mike, and I want you to answer them without acting like I’m trying to butt horns with you. I like Jessie, I always have. I understand your concerns, I truly do. But I got to do things by the book. You need to be straight with me now.’

Mike took another drag on his cigarette to calm himself. ‘Okay.’

‘How has Jessie been of late?’

Mike hooked his thumb into his pockets and glanced at Fay. ‘I don’t know. She was still recovering from the … incident at the school.’

‘I can understand that, after what she went through. But I suppose what I’m asking you is how has she been doing, in herself?’

‘She 
was
 doing okay. Until that Levine woman took it upon herself to go snooping around looking to raise dirt.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Earl took a notebook from his breast pocket and flipped it open. He removed a pen from the spirals and began to write in small neat lines.

‘Has she been sleeping okay?’

‘What the hell kind of question is that?’

‘The kind I’d like answered.’

‘She’s been sleeping, Earl. She sleeps.’

‘She on pain meds still?’

‘Yeah.’

‘She take ’em?’

‘So far as I know.’

‘Any other kind of medication?’

Mike shrugged. ‘Fraas has her on anti-anxiety tablets, and she’s been taking sleeping tablets too.’

‘So, you last saw Jessie on Thursday night. Not Friday.’

‘Right.’

‘So one of you didn’t stay here Thursday night?’

‘We were both here.’

‘But you didn’t actually see her on the Friday?’

‘Correct.’ Mike’s shoulders slumped a little. ‘We had a row, Earl, okay? She slept in the spare room that night. I left for work early before she got up.’

‘So you don’t know—’

‘I saw her here on Friday,’ Fay interrupted.

Earl turned his attention to her. ‘What time was this?’

‘About eleven in the morning.’

‘How did she seem to you when you spoke to her?’

Fay coloured a little. ‘She … she was upset.’

Earl tilted his head to the side. ‘Ma’am?’

‘I confronted her about that article in 
The Gazette
.’

‘I see,’ Earl said steadily. ‘So you, uh, exchanged views.’

‘Well,’ Fay twiddled with her glasses chain. ‘I confess I did the majority of the talking.’

Earl made a note in his book. He looked at it for a moment. ‘Would you say that the discussion ended well?’

‘No, I would not.’

‘And you didn’t talk to her again after that?’

‘No.’

Earl looked at Mike. ‘You know Jessie went to see Ana Diaz a few days ago.’

‘How do you know about that?’ Mike asked.

‘I know because it’s my business to know what goes on in this town, Mike.’

‘She wanted to see her. I told her it was a stupid thing to do but she went anyway.’

‘She tell you the outcome of that visit?’

‘What outcome?’

‘Reports I have are that Ana’s older boy hauled out and attacked Jessie.’

‘He did what now?’

‘She didn’t talk to you about that?’

‘No, she didn’t.’ Mike shook his head, looking down at his shoes. ‘She never mentioned it at all.’

‘What was the last thing you spoke about? Do you recall?’

‘She wanted me to come home to talk; I told her I was going for a drink with Ace. She asked me to call her if I was going to be back late.’

‘And did you? Call, I mean?’

‘No.’

‘Would you say Jessie was in an emotional state?’

‘An 
emotional
 state?’

‘Yes.’

Mike thought for a moment, picturing Jessie standing by the counter, her eyes wide and unfocused. ‘She asked me if I knew what dread was.’

‘Dread?’

‘That’s what she said.’

Earl wrote that down and frowned at it, wrinkling his nose as though the word smelled bad.

‘What about family?’

‘Jessie doesn’t have none, only us. Her folks are dead and she doesn’t keep in contact with her remaining sibling. Hell, I didn’t even know she had a sibling until recently.’

‘She mention anything at all about—’

‘She said nothing about going anywhere,’ Mike’s voice was beginning to rise in desperation. ‘If she had said something I’d be there now.’

Earl closed his notebook and pocketed it. ‘All right, I’ll head into town and put out a missing person’s report. If that’s what you want. Could be, though, she might walk through that door any second. Like you say, she’s had a hard time of it lately, sometimes folk need time alone to sort through their thoughts.’

Mike lowered his head. He couldn’t bear looking at Earl Dubray’s face. He had known the man most of his life and sure as hell knew him well enough to know that Earl did not really believe what he was saying, even as the words left his mouth.

J
essie hammered
on the door until her hands were raw and bleeding. She called and called for him to return, begged him not to leave her there. But he did not return and finally, out of sheer exhaustion, she gave up trying.

She crawled across the floor and located the legs of the bed with her fingertips. Using the last of her strength, she pulled herself onto it, stripped off the clammy rain mac and curled on her side. She cried herself into a fitful sleep.

She dreamed of Rockville High. She saw Tracy Flowers walking down the hallways, the red stain spread over the back of her yellow sundress. Jessie called out to her friend and tried to reach her. She moved as though through treacle and by the time she reached her, Tracy had morphed into something rotten, a putrid gassy thing swollen and bruised. Jessie laid her hand on her shoulder and turned her around. Tracy’s tongue protruded through her broken teeth, her face was a mass of shredded flesh and shattered bone.

Jessie whimpered in the dark. Her body twisted and stretched as another dream, older this time, came from the place she had long since locked away.

Black as pitch and surrounded by flames and heat, a much younger Jessie passed charred windows and soot-filled rooms, her skin blistering from the scorching heat. She was searching, blinded by tears, calling their names, knowing in her gut as she tore from room to room what she would find.

In a room to the rear of the house she found them lying upon a blackened bed, bodies cracked and furled tight against the agony of death, and as she reached for them she heard the howling begin outside the room, sounds of misery and fear, and deep in her sleep Jessie Conway knew that death was right on her shoulder. The sounds, the splintering wood … the howling was now in the room. This was death, this was where she would meet her nightmare in the flesh. She saw rotted fingers fold over her shoulder, smelled the fetid stench of the thing as it pulled her around to face—

Jessie screamed and in doing so, woke. She opened her eyes and reached out into the darkness. She blinked, completely disorientated. Eventually her eyes made out the faintest outline of a doorway close by and as the horrors of sleep left the horrors of her present situation flooded in their stead.

Jessie swung her feet over the side of the cot and stood up shakily. Her throat hurt from where he had grabbed her and she knew without looking she was covered in bruises. He was unbelievably strong; pushing him had been folly.

There was only the tiniest trace of light from the passage outside, but even so it heartened her some. She badly needed to urinate and did so, crouching over the toilet. She washed her face and hands and neck and cupped some of the water to drink. He had not lied. The water tasted foul – earthy and metallic. She gagged but managed to force some of it down.

She paced the room, searching for any weakness or any possibility of escape. But the door was smooth metal with sunken hinges and the floor was compact earth. She dug under the door with her fingers, but gave up after a while: it was pointless. Claustrophobic and anxious, she climbed back onto the bed, pulled her legs to her chest and rested her forehead on her knees. She tried not to think of what lay in store for her. Speculating on that did nothing except make her panicky and fearful. She tried to distract herself from the situation, but despite her efforts, names came to mind: Jaycee, Natasha, women who had been living their lives one day, the next spirited away by men like the one who had taken her. Worse, she realised with a start, they were the lucky ones, if ‘lucky’ they could be called. She knew their names because they had survived their ordeals. They had at least been able to return to some kind of life. What about the women who vanished and were never found again? What happened to them? How many of them were like her? Locked in a living grave, with only a madman as judge and jailor?

This brought fresh fears. What if something happened to him? Nobody would know where she was. She would most likely die here, rotting away in the darkness.

She pressed her fists against her temples. She thought of Mike’s face, his wounded heart. She had not even kissed him goodbye. This upset her greatly and she began to weep. She vowed if she ever saw her husband again she would kiss him long and hard, she would tell him she loved him, she would never stop telling him she loved him.

She thought some more about the man who had taken her. She forced herself to remain calm and be as analytical as she could be. He was very strong. He had lifted her easily and she was just shy of 130 pounds. His demeanour was calm, if oddly disconnected.

He had this place. This was not new to him.

A realisation made her tremble. How many more women had he taken? What had become of them?

She groaned, feeling gorge rise within her. She concentrated on her breathing, trying hard to remain as calm as possible. She did not know how much time had passed when she heard movement overhead and then footsteps on the stairs. She got to her feet.

He unlocked the door and opened it slowly, carefully. Sunlight flooded the chamber from above, forcing her to cover her eyes with her forearm.

‘Sit down.’

She sat. He put something on the floor, pushed it inside and closed the door again.

‘Wait!’ Jessie leaped up and rushed across the room. ‘Wait! Wait! I want to talk to you. 
Come back
.’ She hammered on the door with her fist; she kicked at it so hard her foot ached. ‘What do you want with me? 
You bastard, what do you want with me?
’

She heard the trapdoor slam and then she was alone again. She slid down along the door, unable to contain her tears.

After a while, she regained her composure and dried her face with the sleeve of her cotton top. Her eyes readjusted to the near darkness. She looked for what he had left for her. It was a tray holding a bowl of rice and beans and a glass of milk. She picked the bowl up, then put it back down and pushed it away with her foot. Her stomach growled with hunger. She was disgusted by her needs and felt betrayed by them. She would not touch this food. Who knew what was in it.

She was still by the door when he returned after a short while.

‘Move away from the door.’

She stayed utterly still. How did he know where she was?

‘Move,’ he said, with an edge to his voice she knew was genuine.

She got up and made her way to the cot. He unlocked the door and looked at the bowl.

‘You need to eat.’

‘Please, I want to go home.’

He slammed the door and locked it.

Jessie remained in the dark. She cried, she sang songs, she counted, anything to keep her mind occupied. When he returned hours later, he checked the bowl and grunted.

Jessie hung her head. She had eaten the food.