Level Five (32 page)

             
That’s not the way she wanted to die.  She would not give him the pleasure of beating her to death. She would choose how she died.  She looked at the paper stacks once again. A plan formulated in her mind. If she could somehow get to the top of one of the piles in the back, then maybe she could topple them all, crush Anthony to death and walk out of here.

             
At the moment the idea of moving, of trying to crawl anywhere was daunting, but her time was running out. With that thought in mind, she slowly got to her feet.

             
If he’d gone to work as she suspected, then she should have approximately eight hours to figure things out before he’d return.  She had to use every minute of those eight hours, every ounce of strength she had left.

             
As she headed to the bathroom, each step she took shot pain through her entire body.  A faint nausea accompanied each step. She figured besides the damage he’d done to her eardrum, he’d probably given her another concussion.

             
She had to work through the pain. She had to figure out a way to beat him once and for all.  She stepped into the bathroom and stared at the piles of paper that filled the tub and rose to the ceiling. 

             
There could be a window behind the papers, or there might not be one.  If there was, then she could use the hours of the day to empty the tub, get to the window and crawl out.  And then what?

             
She had no idea what was outside, where she was.  He’d told her they were in the middle of nowhere on ten acres of land, that there were no neighbors anywhere around.

             
If she did manage to get out of the window where would she go for help?  Depending on how long it took her to find the window and get out, he could come home and hunt her down. Then for sure she’d be dead.

             
She wanted him dead. 

             
Her desire to stop him was greater than her pain, bigger than her need to attempt an escape.  She wanted to kill him before he could take another innocent woman.

             
She stepped out of the bathroom and looked up at the seemingly unreachable heights of one of the back towers of paper.  There was no way she could climb a vertical mountain without foot or handholds. 

             
She was going to have to build a staircase with the papers from the bathroom.  As she moved the first pile of papers from the tub to the base of the tower she wanted to climb, her arms ached and screamed in protest. 

             
When she lifted the second bunch, she stopped and dry-heaved. Her head spun with dizziness.  There was nothing in her stomach to come up.  The last thing he’d given her to eat was the apple and that had been two nights ago.

Push past the pain, she told herself.  Think about Colette and all the abuse she managed to survive.  Think about Jake.  Even though he’d told her he needed time to figure out what he wanted, where he needed to go, she knew that if she managed to escape, he’d be waiting for her.

Forever.

That’s what he’d told her. He’d wait forever for her.

These thoughts gave her strength and for the next couple of hours she moved stacks of paper like a staircase to Heaven. 

When she’d managed to get halfway to the ceiling she stopped and rested and gazed at her work.  She thought it was enough.  About halfway up the papers were less neat, creating places she thought would hold knees and elbows as she
crawled the rest of the way.

It was a dangerous plan.  She could get halfway up and create an avalanche in which she would be crushed, but at least she’d be dying her way…fighting until the end and robbing him of her death at his hands.

Although it was difficult to judge time, when she thought it was growing near the time that Anthony would return home, she began the climb, hoping to reach the very top of the back row. He wouldn’t even be able to see her hiding there.   

As she began her treacherous climb, her heart beat a million miles a minute.   Wait for him to enter the room, create an avalanche, crush him to death and then walk out the door.

It was her mantra.  Wait for him to enter the room, create an avalanche, crush him to death and then walk out the door. The words played over and over again in her head as she slowly made her way up the tall tower.

More than once her breath caught. She froze as papers shifted and swayed beneath her…around her.  For the first time in a long time, Edie prayed her plan would work, that she would live to escape and become the woman she was meant to be.

The higher she got the hotter it became. She began to sweat and her skin was slick against the paper.  Bugs crawled over her arms, up her legs, disturbed by her very presence in their house.

The heat, coupled with the pain in her ribs made each breath agony and still she climbed. This was her final chance to beat him, to destroy him.

As she finally reached the top, she lay on her side, unable to see beyond the stack of papers before her, unable to sit up in the space between where she was and the ceiling of the room.

Before she’d begun her climb, she’d closed the bathroom door.  Anthony was a creature of habit. She had to hope, to pray
that he would be that today.  He’d come into the room, place his folding chair in the center and assume she was in the bathroom. He’d wait for her to return to the laptop at the center of the small bare space in the middle of the room.

She was afraid to move, afraid that in doing so she would create the landslide of papers before he got into place.  She had to time it perfectly.

She could feel the instability of the stacks beneath her, knew that a simple deep breath, the twitch of a muscle could make them fall. Once one tower fell, others would follow.

Dead.
  He’d die just like the mother he loved…the woman he’d hated. Crushed by his hoard.  It felt like a fitting end to his life.

Of course, she knew there was no guarantee she would survive the mass destruction she was about to set in motion. She was willing to take the chance.

Minutes passed, ticking off in agonizingly slow increments.  And in the silence of waiting, Edie found the self-love that had been missing from her life since Francine’s murder so long ago.

The fact that Janet Carpenter had lost one child to murder and had abandoned another wasn’t Edie’s fault.  It was a flaw of weakness in the woman who had given birth to her.

Her father suffered from the same character flaw, a weakness that had cast him into the position of his choice.  Checking out on life, on her, had been his choice.

Like Colette, Edie found herself thinking of all the things she would do and enjoy when she gained her freedom.  She’d reach out and make more friends.  She’d go to lunch and shop and gain a better balance between her writing and real living.

She’d eat a bag full of Oreo cookies, something she hadn’t touched since Francine’s death.  She’d run in the rain without a coat, stay up all night and watch old movies.

Finally she’d marry Jake…if he’d still have her. And they’d plan a
family, build a life based on happiness with each other and within themselves.

Greg Bernard had taken three victims, her sister, her father and mother.  He’d almost taken her as well. He didn’t get to take it all.  He and his crime no longer had any power over her.  She refused to be his fourth victim.  He didn’t get to win.

And live or die now, she was just as determined that Anthony didn’t get to win, either.

Her heart thumped as she heard the faint sound of the microwave ding.

It was just before five when Teddy showed up at Edie’s place to fill Jake in on the investigation.  The big man looked tired.  He accepted the cold beer Jake handed him and together with Rufus, the three went outside on the deck. 

Teddy took a long pull of his beer and leaned back in the chair. Rufus lay down at Jake’s feet and released a deep doggy sigh.

“When are you coming back to work?” he asked Jake.  “Even though you can’t work on Edie’s case, we could use you back on the job.”

“There are mornings I wake up and wish I was getting dressed and ready to head into work.”  Jake took a drink from his beer bottle. “But most of the time I feel like I need to be here waiting for her when she comes home.”

Teddy frowned and broke eye contact with Jake. In that disconnect, Jake realized Teddy believed she was never coming home.

“We’ve got men armed with photos of the man in the video checking out the office buildings around the McDonalds, but there’s dozens of businesses in that area. So far nobody has recognized him.  It’s possible he doesn’t work in the area, doesn’t have anything to do with that area of town but just occasionally stops in there for lunch.”

“It’s not hopeless,” Jake replied.

Teddy looked at him once again.  “It’s definitely feeling hopeless.”

Jake shook his head.  “I refuse to give up hope until a body is found.  Until then, she’s still alive as far as I’m concerned.”

“Yeah, you and Danielle Black.  Maybe you two can start your own club.”  Instantly Teddy raised a hand in supplication.  “Sorry, that was uncalled for.  I’m cranky and tired. You know she’s left a hole in our lives, too.  Just this morning at breakfast Snap asked when we were going to see Aunt Edie again.”

“What did you tell her?”

Teddy shrugged.  “I told her whenever we found her.  She told me I must be a bad detective if I couldn’t even find one woman.”

Emotion pressed against Jake’s heart. The painful vise squeezed so tight it was hard to draw a breath.  “I paid her father’s rent for the month and took him some groceries.”

Teddy looked at him in surprise.  “Why?”

“Edie would have wanted me to.”

“And what happens next month when the rent is due again?”

Jake took another drink of his beer before replying.  “I’ll face that bridge when I reach it.”

“What he needs is some long-term treatment and a swift kick in the ass.”

“I plan on talking to a social worker to see if we can get him some help, but the person’s got to want it. I’m not sure James Carpenter wants to be helped.”  Jake’s thoughts of Edie’s father were a combination of anger and sympathy.

“Edie would be better off without him,” Teddy exclaimed.

“That’s for Edie to decide when she gets home.”

A heavy silence fell between the two men, broken only by the sound of cicadas singing in the trees in the distance. Edie used to joke that the noisy male cicadas spent the heat of the day bitching about their mates.

Once again the vise squeezed his heart.  It wasn’t sorrow. It wasn’t grief. It was need.  His need to hold her once again, his desire to see the sparkle of her eyes, to hear the sound of her laughter diminished any grief or sorrow that might find purchase in his heart.

“Next week,” he said suddenly.  “Next week I’ll be back on the job.”  It was time.  He needed to do something constructive with his time. Edie would hate him being so unproductive.  If he couldn’t find her kidnapper, then he would find somebody else’s, he could work the cases that would get the bad guys off the street. That’s what he did, that and loving Edie.

The sound of the key in the door tensed every muscle in Edie’s body.  She lay on her side with her good ear up so she could hear him when he entered the room, could guess when it was time to move.

The door creaked open and she heard the sound of his shoes on the floor. 
“Edie?  Hurry up in there.  You know I don’t like to be kept waiting.”

She heard the chair as the legs unfolded and she shifted her weight.  That’s all it took. She felt a moment of weightlessness and then it was as if the entire room folded in on itself.

She saw the papers crash into his stomach, and then had a single moment of his face, his mouth opened in an endless scream.  He was then swallowed whole, disappearing from her sight. 

There was
nothing but the noise of papers falling and she rode the crest of a wave like a surfer, desperate not to get sucked under the water.

Dust flew, darkening the room.  Pain in her ribs, in her shoulder and then silence.  She coughed, nearly choking on the dust that hung just above where she lay…alive.

A sweet euphoria filled her.  She’d done it.  She was alive and he was someplace dead at the bottom of the mountain.  Slowly moving her arms and then her legs to check for damage, she sat up and gazed around.

Why didn’t she see sunlight streaming in through windows?  Why didn’t she see windows at all?  In horror she realized the mounds of paper where she sat were so high they covered the windows and the door she’d intended to be her exit.

A giggle bubbled out of her lips at the irony. She’d totally misjudged the amount of paper in the room and what would happen when it all came tumbling down.

The giggle turned into a full blown burst of laughter, hysterical laughter. She couldn’t control it.  She laughed so hard she wheezed, knowing that in the laughter was more than a strain of insanity.