Terrified (24 page)

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Authors: Kevin O'Brien

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Terrified
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Maneuvering around the stupid SUV, she pulled into the driveway. She shifted to park and turned off the ignition. The engine stopped purring. In the silence, she took a deep breath.
“Mom, are you okay?”
“No overnights for a while,” she announced. Then she climbed out of the car.
Josh grabbed his bag and scurried out of the passenger side. “That’s fair enough. Or are you just getting started?”
She pressed the lock device on her key chain, and the car beeped. “I’m not sure yet,” she admitted, heading up the steps to their front door. She unlocked it and stepped inside.
Megan hesitated in the front hallway. She thought she’d left more lights on in the house. There was just the hallway light and one small lamp on in the living room. The rest of the place was dark. She glanced toward the living room again. The window curtains were closed. She could have sworn she’d left them open.
It didn’t make sense. The front door was locked. Who would break in, turn off some lights, close the curtains in the front of the house, and then leave—locking the door after him?
Then again, what made her so sure he’d left?
Josh closed the door. He brushed past her, and then put his bag down at the foot of the stairs.
“Honey, wait a second,” she murmured, reaching for the cell phone in the pocket of her sweater. At this point, she was almost ready to call 911. “I think somebody’s in the house.”
Wide-eyed, Josh stared at her. They both stood there, frozen, listening for the next sound. Suddenly, the refrigerator started up with a hum. Both of them gave a little jump.
Josh started to laugh. “God, you’re freaking me out, Mom.”
She caught a breath, and patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry, hon.”
With a bit of hesitation, he headed toward the kitchen.
Megan watched him switch on the overhead light. She pulled off her sweater and hung it on the newel post. “Honey, I know it’s late, but we really need to have a talk,” she said. “Something has come up that’s pretty serious… .”
She glanced at him again. With his back to her, he stood at the kitchen entry, staring down at the floor.
“Josh?”
“What’s this?” he asked.
Megan started toward him, and then stopped dead.
In the center of the kitchen, an empty, black garbage bag was spread out on the floor.
Josh turned toward her. “Did you put this down here?”
Megan stared at him. It took her a moment to notice behind Josh, in the little hallway beyond the kitchen, the back door was halfway open.
Suddenly, someone darted from the powder room into the laundry room. He wore blue jeans, a black sweater, and a black ski mask.
“Josh!” she screamed. “Get out … get out of here!”
All at once, the lights went off.
“What’s going on?” Josh cried.
In the darkness, she pulled him toward the front hallway. She heard him bang into something and let out a gasp. Blindly, she waved her hand around until she felt the newel post and her sweater. “Go! Run outside!” she said, pushing him toward the door. “Just keep running.…”
She frantically patted down the sweater until she found her cell phone in the pocket.
“I can’t just leave you—”
The stomping of footsteps cut him off. Someone was running from the kitchen, through the dining room. Their intruder must have knocked over a chair, because there was a loud crash. Megan saw a shadowy figure in the living room, barreling toward them. He had something raised in his hand. It looked like a baton or a small baseball bat.
“No!” Megan screamed. She tried to push Josh out of the way, but it was too late. The intruder bashed him over the head with the small bat. She heard her son let out a feeble cry, and then he crashed to the floor.
She started toward him. But all at once, she felt something hard slam across the side of her face. Her legs gave out from under her and she flopped back, banging into the newel post and sinking to the floor—just a few feet from Josh.
She couldn’t get her breath. Even in the darkness, she saw only a blinding white flash. Her ear was ringing. She remembered this brand of pain from fifteen years ago—from 1996.
Before Megan knew what was happening, the man in the ski mask was hovering over her. She felt something tickling her neck and realized it was the point of a switchblade knife. Things started to come into focus. On the floor, right by her hand, she saw her cell phone—its blue light glowing.
“Give me the phone,” he said in a strange, raspy voice.
This close to him, Megan could smell the musky scent of Glenn’s old cologne.
She surrendered the cell phone to him. Then she started toward Josh to make sure he was still alive. With the sudden movement, she felt the tip of the knife graze the flesh under her jaw. Megan didn’t know if she was bleeding, and she didn’t care. She put her hand on Josh’s chest, and felt his heartbeat. He was moaning in pain. “Josh, sweetie, can you hear me? Josh—”
The man grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back. She hit the newel post and sank to the floor again.
The intruder stood over her. “I’m taking custody,” she heard him say in his gravelly voice. “And if you call the police or tell anyone, I’ll cut his throat.”
Megan couldn’t move. She tried to focus, but her vision was blurred. It looked like he’d pulled Josh to his feet. She could hear Josh groaning. There was a click, and then the front door creaked. As it opened, the outside light spilled into the hallway. She could see them in silhouette. The man dragged Josh outside.
“Glenn!” she cried, struggling to get up.
The door shut. Darkness fell over her once again.
Megan heard an engine start, and then tires screeching. It sounded like a scream, slowly fading to silence.
She managed to grab onto the newel post and pulled herself up. She shook violently as she made her way to the door and opened it. The silver SUV that had been by her driveway earlier was now gone.
“Oh, God, please, no,” she whispered, clinging to the door handle to keep from collapsing. Tears streamed down her face, mingling with the blood from the cut on her neck where the knife had grazed her.
Megan turned and staggered back inside. There was enough light for her to navigate toward the kitchen. She kept a shaky hand on the wall, and then the counter. She had to call the police. She didn’t care what he’d said. They would find him faster than she ever could. It didn’t matter what happened to her after this—as long as she got Josh back.
Megan almost slipped on the garbage bag he’d laid out on the kitchen floor. She grabbed the counter to keep her balance. She heard the refrigerator still humming. He’d switched off all the lights in the fuse box, but the refrigerator and stove were on a different row of switches. She opened the refrigerator door, and with the light in there, she was able to see the phone.
She reached for the cordless and tried to switch it on. She’d forgotten that the base needed to be powered for the phone to work.
All at once, she heard the charging footsteps again. Before she knew it, he’d knocked her down. The phone flew out of her hand and slid across the kitchen floor. He grabbed her neck, pinning her against the garbage bag bunched up on the floor beneath her. His grip was so tight, Megan couldn’t breathe.
She was totally helpless. Her right hand was trapped underneath her, and he had his knee over her left arm. “I told you not to call the police, Lisa,” he said in that horrible, raspy voice. Through the holes in his ski mask, his cruel eyes studied her. In the dim light, she couldn’t see their color. “Don’t you realize I’m watching your every move?”
He eased up on his grip around her throat—just enough for her to speak: “I’ll do whatever you say,” she whimpered. “Please—please, don’t hurt him… .”
“But I will—every time you don’t follow my orders. Understand, Lisa?”
All she could do was nod obediently.
He let go of her neck, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his switchblade. He opened it with a click. “You disobeyed me, and I have to do something about that. This is the only time I’ll give you a choice. Shall I hurt you or him?”
Dumbstruck, she gazed up at him. She knew he meant every word he said. “Me,” she heard herself say. “Hurt me.”
His knee still had her left arm pinned down. He glanced at her left hand, and then tugged at the third finger. “There used to be a ring on this finger. Remember, Lisa?”
She helplessly watched as he pressed the switchblade against the second joint. He let out a grunt, and the knife sliced through her finger, cutting it off.
Megan shrieked in pain. He quickly slapped his hand over her mouth, stifling her screams. “Tina and Brian aren’t home, but we still can’t let the other neighbors hear you,” he said. He kept his hand on her mouth—until she was just sobbing quietly.
“Next time you disobey me, it’ll be your little bastard who’ll pay for it,” he said, closing the switchblade knife. He stepped back, but stopped to flick the edge of the garbage bag so it half covered her. “If you don’t do exactly as I say, the next time you see him, he’ll be inside one of these—in pieces.”
He snatched up something from the floor, and casually tossed it at her. It was the severed part of her finger. “Put it in a Baggie,” he said. “Keep it cool, but don’t put it directly on ice. Give them a good story at the hospital about how you cut it off. You remember how to lie to them from all those times you ended up in the emergency room, don’t you, Lisa?”
She couldn’t answer him. She clutched her wounded hand. It was all she could do to keep from screaming out in agony.
“Be convincing tonight,” he said, backing away—toward the screen door off the kitchen. “Maybe they can save your finger. And you can save your kid.”
He opened the screen door.
“Glenn!” she cried to the shadowy figure in her doorway. “Don’t hurt him, please! Glenn, he’s your son!”
Wincing, Megan closed her eyes. She heard the screen door slam shut.
C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN
M
egan told the nurse at Harborview’s emergency room admittance desk that she’d cut off her finger while chopping vegetables. And then, according to her story, in her panic-stricken state, she’d run into the edge of a doorway. Megan hoped that would explain the redness and swelling on one side of her face. She didn’t think the nurse believed her for a minute. The story didn’t quite mesh with the fact that she’d still had the composure to phone for a taxi. She’d also had the wherewithal to put her severed finger in a Baggie, which she’d placed inside some cold water in an old thermos of Josh’s from when he was a little boy. It had the Smurfs on it.
The emergency room was something out of a nightmare at 1:15 on that Sunday morning. It was like a cross between a small, busy airport terminal and an insane asylum. People were shouting, screaming, and crying. Everywhere Megan looked, someone was bleeding or battered. In the short time Megan waited, paramedics intermittently rushed through the big room, wheeling sick, dying, or traumatized people on gurneys. Cops passed through with handcuffed men whose heads had been bashed in. Megan imagined sitting there with Josh, and it was his voice in her head she heard:
Most of the people here look like they belong on
The Jerry Springer Show.
She smiled for just a fleeting moment, but then she started crying.
No one really noticed. At least, she didn’t think anyone did—not in this circus. Still Megan wondered if Josh’s abductor had sent someone to spy on her right now. She kept glancing about to see if anyone was staring at her.
Don’t you realize I’m watching your every move?
he’d said.
There had to be a second person involved in what had happened tonight. Someone had driven away in the silver SUV with Josh, while Glenn—at least, she thought it had been Glenn—had come back to attack her in the kitchen.
Even when the doctor was sewing her finger back on, Megan kept staring at the nurses and orderlies hurrying in and out of the area. Any one of them could have been Glenn’s colleague.
For the procedure, they gave her a local anesthetic—along with a sedative and a painkiller. It made her slightly loopy, but all the more guarded about what she said. She remembered having the same sensation when she’d been in labor with Josh. She’d been so worried someone at the hospital would see the burn marks on her left side and connect them to the Lisa Swann murder case in Chicago. She’d thought the drugs might make her lose all inhibitions—and she’d end up saying her real name or mentioning something about the baby’s monster of a father.
Now, for all she knew, Josh could be dead. She kept crying uncontrollably while the surgeon worked to save her finger. “Megan, please,” said the nurse, who held an ice bag to her face to reduce the swelling. “The area has been anesthetized. You can’t possibly feel anything.…”
The operation took two and a half hours. They claimed she was in no condition to make it home on her own—even by cab. The nurse wanted her to phone a friend to pick her up and make sure she got to bed. Megan considered Teresa, but her coworker had the Sunday shift this week, and she had to open the office in three and a half hours. Besides, Teresa would want to know what happened—and she wasn’t going to buy some stupid story about chopping vegetables and then running into the edge of a doorway at one o’clock in the morning.
Megan took a taxi home. Her left hand was swaddled up in a big bandage, and her arm was suspended in a sling around her left shoulder. Throughout the cab ride, she kept checking the rear window to see if anyone was following them.
Plodding through the front doorway, Megan expected the place to be in a shambles. But there wasn’t much of a mess at all—just a little blood and some scuff marks on the front hallway’s tiled floor; one chair tipped over in the dining room; more scuff marks and blood on the kitchen floor, and the empty trash bag. With all the devastation, there was very little damage or mess to show for it—like those bombs that leave buildings standing, and only kill people.
Josh’s overnight bag was at the foot of the stairs. She took it, and wearily climbed up the steps to the second floor. She set the bag just inside his bedroom door. An awful, empty achiness swelled within her, and she turned away as the tears started to fill her eyes. She thought she might be sick, and hurried into the bathroom. With her good hand braced against the wall, she leaned over the toilet. Nothing happened. She took a few deep breaths, and then stopped to look at herself in the mirror. The side of her face where he’d hit her twice was slightly red and still tender, but the ice pack they’d given her at the hospital had subdued the swelling. She had a long bandage just under her jaw. The cut had bled a lot, but the wound was superficial.
Heading toward her bedroom, Megan took off her blouse. She had trouble getting the sleeve around the bulky bandage enveloping her hand. She finally got scissors from her dresser and cut the sleeve open. It wasn’t until she let the bloodstained blouse drop to the floor that she noticed something on her bed.
It was Josh’s orange Sunset Bowl jacket that he’d had on earlier tonight. The man who had taken him must have come back and left it for her while she’d been at the hospital.
The jacket was neatly folded up on her pillow.
 
 
With Vivaldi’s “Winter” from
The Four Seasons
blasting over his state-of-the-art sound system, he stood in front of his antique desk in the living room. Brandishing a pencil as if he were conducting a symphony, he watched his reflection in the darkened glass of the bay windows. He loved those sharp, staccato violin sounds. With the closest neighbor a quarter of a mile away, there was no one to complain about the music. It was one of the advantages to owning a farmhouse.
He was elated. At last, he had Lisa where he wanted her. She was his puppet. She would do anything he said. He was pulling all the strings, and she would dance for him. He’d wanted this for fifteen years.
He conducted the invisible orchestra, working himself into a frenzied state as the music swelled to a crescendo. The selection ended, and there was silence. He felt the perspiration trickling down his spine. His T-shirt was soaked through. But he wasn’t tired. He was ready to conduct the next selection.
As he waited for the new piece to start, he heard a faint, muffled cry. He could barely make out the words. The boy’s pleas were coming from down in the basement. The screams traveled through the bathroom vent, no doubt.
To the man playing conductor, the distant sound was slightly annoying—like hearing a neighbor with their radio on just a tad too loudly.
A selection from Handel started up, and it drowned out the boy’s cries.
The man smiled at his reflection in the darkened glass, and then he began conducting again.
 
 
Megan woke up feeling horrible. She wished everything that had happened last night had been just a terrible dream. But she knew better. Her head throbbed, and a dull, heavy pain coursed through her entire left hand. She squinted at the bandage wrapped around it and started to cry.
At the hospital, they’d given her two doses of Vicodin and a prescription for more. Apparently there had been enough drugs in her system that she’d nodded off half-dressed on top of her bed for three hours.
Megan bolted off the bed, and staggered down the hall to check Josh’s room. Nothing was different, only he wasn’t there. Devastated, she wandered into the bathroom and splashed some cold water on her face.
Downstairs, she took only half a dose of the Vicodin—with a chaser of strong coffee. She needed to have her wits about her today, even if she was a wreck. She wasn’t going to get her son back if she was half out of it on painkillers.
She’d checked online to see if Rmembr1996—or whatever his new screen name might be—had emailed her again. She was hoping for some kind of ransom message or any acknowledgment that Josh was still alive. But there was nothing.
Desperate, she looked up
Dr. Glenn Swann
again to see if there was anything new. She found a brief story on
WGNnews.com
about how the police were trying to locate him. He was considered a “person of interest” in Willow Dwyer’s murder from fifteen years ago.
The article quoted Glenn’s lawyer, Jerome Purcell, who pointed out:
“Dr. Swann has not been charged with any crime. He is not avoiding the police. I suspect, after his long ordeal, he merely wants to be alone. Every effort is being made to locate him. I’m confident once Dr. Swann learns of the latest development in this case, he will get in touch with the proper authorities and assist them in every way he can.”
Jerry hadn’t been Glenn’s trial lawyer, but he’d been his attorney for a long, long time. Megan wondered if he knew more than he admitted regarding Glenn’s current whereabouts. If only she could find Glenn and try to negotiate with him, he might let Josh go. Did he even know Josh was his? She didn’t care what Glenn did to her, just as long as he didn’t hurt Josh.
Maybe she could get to him through his lawyer. Jerry wouldn’t be in his office on a Sunday. Fifteen years ago, he’d lived in Lake Forest. Megan remembered driving back from a party at his place, and getting slapped in the face once Glenn had gotten her home and in the front door. Apparently, she’d made some comment at the dinner table that Glenn hadn’t liked. She didn’t recall what she’d said exactly, but she remembered Jerome Purcell’s stately home in Lake Forest.
Megan went into the kitchen, and grabbed the cordless phone, the same phone he’d knocked out of her hand last night. She tried directory assistance for area code 847. They didn’t have a Jerome Purcell in Lake Forest, but there was a listing for Jerome Purcell in Lincolnshire. The cities weren’t far apart at all. Megan took down the number.
She only got as far as dialing the area code again, and then she hung up. Jerry wasn’t about to tell her where Glenn was—even if he knew. In all probability, Glenn’s lawyer had no idea she was still alive. He’d see the name, Megan Keeslar, on his caller ID. He’d see the Seattle area code. What was to keep him from telling Glenn or the police?
Maybe the Vicodin was muddling her thought process after all, because it suddenly dawned on her that she could talk directly to Glenn. The man who had taken her son had also taken her cell phone.
Her hands shaking, Megan poured another cup of coffee and dialed her own cell phone number. Her voice mail greeting came on:
“Hi, thanks for calling. This is Megan, and I’m sorry you missed me. Please leave a message after the beep. Bye.”
Beep.
“I’m not sure you’ll get this or not,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “You—seem to know enough about me, you might even know how to retrieve my messages. Glenn, if this is you, you need to know that he’s your son. If you hurt him, you’re hurting your own flesh and blood. Just ask him when he was born, and he’ll tell you. Then do the math. I didn’t know when I ran away that I was carrying your child. Understand … Josh is yours. Just let me talk to him, and I’ll do anything you say. Give me a couple of seconds on the phone with him so I know he’s all right—so I know you haven’t killed him.” She started to cry. “Please, please, you can do whatever you want to me. Just don’t hurt him. He’s a good kid. He—he’s a sweet boy. He hasn’t done anything to you. He hasn’t done anything to deserve this. If—if you’ll just—”
There was a faint click, and then a recorded voice:
“To review your message, press one now. If you are unsatisfied with your message, press two… .”
Megan hung up. She wiped her tears away with her one good hand. She couldn’t help feeling no one would ever hear her plea. She’d merely been talking to herself.
 
 
By 2:30 in the afternoon, Megan couldn’t take any more sitting around, waiting and crying. Several times, she’d gone to the phone and almost called the police. But she kept thinking it would mean a death sentence for Josh.
She wasn’t sure how her driving skills would hold up with just one working hand and a second Vicodin. So she called a taxi, which dropped her in front of Destination Rent-a-Car.
Leaving her green blazer at home, she’d donned a pair of jeans and a navy-blue fisherman’s knit sweater—with loose sleeves. The left one had still been a tight squeeze for her heavily bandaged hand, but she’d managed. It had been years since she’d been put to the test, but Megan had done a decent job cosmetically camouflaging the bruises on her face.
Still, Teresa—in the middle of helping a customer—let out a gasp when she saw Megan come through the door. Megan just shook her head at her and came around behind the counter. Even if she’d concealed the bruises on her face, she still had a Band-Aid along her jaw. Plus there was no hiding her left arm in a sling or the layered bandage mummifying her hand. With her one good hand, she struggled to pull out the big box of lost-and-found items they kept under the counter.
“Excuse me for just a minute, please,” Teresa told her customer. Then she came to Megan’s aid and hoisted up the bulky, heavy box. “What the hell happened to you?” she whispered. “You look horrible. What are you doing here anyway?”
Megan led the way to her office. “I fell down the stairs in the front of the house last night,” she lied. “I did a real number on my hand—stitches, a sprain, the works. I banged up my face a little, too.”

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