Now why was that?
She glanced at him through the window as he drove on by. It was impossible to smile for him again though she knew he needed it. She knew how he was feeling. But a single smile was all she had in her today and she’d spent that currency in the car.
The sound and feel of her heels on the sidewalk seemed to jolt straight through her. The cold hard streets of New York City. She realized she was trembling. A young Hispanic delivery boy on a bicycle shot past her. Going the wrong way, against traffic, and on the sidewalk no less. She shot him a disgusted angry glance that he was moving too fast to see.
Her hands were cold. Her face was flushed. Already she dreaded the picketers moving ahead of her a few yards away. Despite what she’d said to him.
Because this was no examination. This was the real thing.
A life was going to end here.
For a moment she was angry with both of them. Sara and Greg, playing at love.
No, she thought. Give the dev il his due.
They weren’t playing.
And that was the saddest part of all. Because it wasn’t fair. Years and years alone after Daniel’s death and her shattered marriage and finally someone comes along who’s got everything Sam never had and more. Kindness. Consideration. Sobriety. And he loves her. Not just wants her or wants to fuck her but loves her and she loves the man back with a power she finds quite astonishing. And then having to learn all over again that love protected nothing. Love was as necessary to people in the long run as food and shelter but love was also a cruel joke, a trick, both at once, two sides of the same coin. And you never knew when the coin would be turning. Because if it didn’t wind up this way, wind up stranding you between love and necessity, even if it did work out between you, then one of you was going to die before the other and leave you all alone again. Love was also about the death of love.
Like this.
Like killing the child inside, their child, who should have been a wonderful child alive and whole and made of all they had together.
Sara even thought she knew when she’d conceived her—on a warm windy beach that night in St. John just three months past, both of them so crazy over each other especially in that place with his other life so far behind him that they were downright ridiculous together, unable to stop touching, stroking, laughing, all through drinks and dinner. And then later making love in the Carribean Sea, the warmth of the waves, the huge gentle womb of stars and sky.
Which led here.
It was as though it were love itself they were killing.
In the eye of her flesh she saw a beautiful baby girl.
And knowing that the child was there and knowing already the empty pain of the loss of her, so unexpectedly like that other loss so many years ago, here and now on this busy sunny street, she wondered how long she could go on with him afterwards. If this were not the turning point for both of them.
If she weren’t killing the child inside in more ways than one.
She’d begun to cry again. A thin haze of tears as she approached the picket lines. She blinked them back instead of wiping them away. These people might notice. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
How can you do this? she thought. How can you be so small and nasty and so monumentally selfish as to approach me now, when I’ve never been so vulnerable?
But of course they would.
They saw it as their right, their mission.
There were many kinds of evil in the world and as far as she was concerned this was definitely one of them.
She heard a car approach slowly behind her close to the curb, wheels over pebbled glass and gravel. In her peripheral vision she saw the fender and the light blue hood, the driver’s-side window and roof and noted that it was a station wagon, one of those fake woodies, maybe ten years old. A city transit bus pulled laboriously around to the left of it. She passed an elegant slim young woman pushing two infant babies in a double stroller. A teenager on a skateboard.
And then the car stopped moving beside her and the passenger door opened in front of her and she felt someone’s arm wrap tight around her from behind just beneath her breasts, pinning her arms to her sides while his hand sought and covered her mouth to stifle the protest, the scream, grasping at the jaw so she couldn’t bite and then she was shoved inside, his hand still over her mouth and she glanced back to the sidewalk and saw that one of the protesters, a man wearing a dark blue windbreaker, had noticed her, was looking straight at her, was seeing all of this but was saying nothing, not one word to the others nor to the police at the clinic door, astonished by this as she felt a needle pierce the bare flesh of her upper arm and saw that it was the driver, a woman, holding a plastic syringe between her fingers and grimly clutching the wheel with her other fisted hand while the man who’d grabbed her slammed the door.
As darkness descended over all her sudden fears and long familiar sorrow they slowly pulled away.
He walked by an old woman with a shopping cart full of groceries and then past the picketers, barely noticing them this time and past the pair of cops, one male and one female, who were standing at the entrance. He walked through the revolving doors and past the bank’s ATM machines to the elevators, got in and punched eleven. The door to the reception room swung open ahead of him and he stepped aside for a young blonde woman in jeans and a tee shirt who smiled at him. Or maybe she was just smiling at the world that day.
At least somebody was happy.
He walked in and the reception room was empty. He thought my god, had they taken her in already?
Was anything that had to do with medicine or New York City ever that fast?
The receptionist behind the sliding glass windows smiled at him too. A purely formal smile, meant to be reassuring. See? We’re harmless here.
“Sara Foster.” he said quietly.
She checked her clipboard.
“Yes. She’s got a ten forty-five with Doctor Weller.”
“He’s seeing her already?”
The clock on the wall behind her read ten thirty.
“No, it’s a ten forty-five appointment, sir.”
“She’s not here?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. But if you’d want to take a seat I imagine she’ll be along shortly.”
“I don’t understand. I just dropped her off. Right here in front of the building. Just this minute.”
The receptionist frowned, puzzled. “I’m sorry. She hasn’t signed in.”
Sara wouldn’t do this, he thought.
Something’s not right here.
“There’s a drugstore a few doors down and a smoke-shop just next door to us. Maybe she needed something. Why don’t you have a seat and wait a moment. I’m sure she’ll be right along.”
“Why would she…? Okay. I’ll be back.”
He took the elevator down.
After the cool of the overly air-conditioned office the summer sun hit him hard and he was sweating as he peered through the open door to the cigarette shop to see nothing but an old man buying a Lotto ticket and then into the drugstore next to that. He looked around him on either side and then scanned Broadway across the street toward the Sony complex and the shoppers in front of the Food Emporium but he didn’t see her. He walked around the picketers again and directly to the cops at the door.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Did a woman just go inside?”
The female cop was almost as tall as her partner, nearly six feet. Her hair was blonde pulled up under the cap and she stopped chewing her gum the moment he walked up to her.
“Just now? No, sir.”
“Did you see a woman, five, maybe ten minutes ago, white short-sleeve blouse, blue skirt, early forties, long dark hair?” He pointed. “She’d have been coming this way toward the building. I dropped her off over there. She has an appointment at the clinic.”
The officer glanced at her partner. So did Greg, actually noticing him for the first time. The cop looked shockingly young. He was big and tr
im but to Greg he looked barely out of his teens. He guessed the woman would have a good ten years on him. The cop shook his head.
“Sorry, sir,” the woman said and glanced behind him.
“Is there a problem?” Greg turned and saw a much smaller woman in a brown business suit and baggy trousers. Her tailored white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar so that the tie hung slightly off to one side. She wore no makeup as far as he could tell and the medium-length hair was a frizzy red.
“I’m Lieutenant Primiano, 20th precinct.” She produced a wallet and shield. “You said something about a woman?”
“She’s disappeared.”
“How so?”
“I let her out on that corner. I went to park the car. I drove past her and around the block and parked on 67th. She had an appointment for ten forty-five and she was headed right here, walking right toward you when I left her but I went inside and the receptionist says she never showed. She suggested maybe the smokeshop or the pharmacy but I just looked in both places and she’s not there. This isn’t like her. Sara does what she says she’ll do. She should be up there.”
“You folks have any kind of fight? Quarrel over anything?”
“God, no. We’re fine.”
He felt himself flush at the use of the word. They were not fine. Not today.
But that was their own business.
The woman studied him a moment and then nodded. “Ella, keep an eye on things here a minute, will you? Dean, ask around and see if any of these people noticed her. Your name, sir?”
“Greg Glover.”
“This is Officer Kaltsas and Officer Spader. Mr. Glover, let’s go on back inside.”
She questioned the receptionist and Weller’s nurse and then the doctor himself. She was brisk and to the point. It took maybe ten minutes tops but to Greg it seemed forever. Weller volunteered the notion that it happened sometimes, that at the last minute people changed their minds. You really couldn’t blame them.
“Not Sara,” he said. “She wouldn’t do that. Not possible.”
When they were outside again she asked the young cop, Kaltsas, about the picketers.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nobody saw her. I got a small problem with one of them, though.”
“What kind of problem.”
“Maybe he’s just a weirdo, I dunno. Didn’t answer me right away. Something not right, maybe.”
“Which one?”
“Bald guy with the beard in the blue windbreaker. With the sign that says PRO CHOICE IS NO CHOICE. Right there.”
Greg looked at him. Middle-aged man with thinning hair, parading in a rough circle between two older women.
“Okay. Talk to him again. Get his name, address, phone number. If you can, see that he sticks around a while but go easy. I’m going to take a walk with Mr. Glover, see if we can spot her on the street.”
“Will do.”
“Have you got a photo of her? Of Sara?”
He dug it out of his wallet. It was his favorite shot, taken on summer vacation a year before on the streets of Jamaica, Vermont, the Jamaica Inn’s garlanded white porch in the background. She always hated having her picture taken and was wearing a goofy smile because of that but to him both then and now she looked lovely, her long hair swirling around her face. He had snapped and snapped her that day out of pure, almost adolescent plea sure, until she practically had to scream to make him quit.
She studied the photo and handed it back to him. “She’s very pretty,” she said. “We’ll start with your car. Maybe she went looking for you for some reason. Where’d you park again?”
“Down on 67th.”
She began walking slowly downtown. He matched her pace.
“This is crazy,” he said. “People don’t vanish.”
“No, sir. They don’t,” she said. “I think we’ll find her.”
Of course they would, he thought. There had to be some normal explanation. Maybe the doctor was right. Maybe Greg didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. Maybe she was sitting in a restaurant a block or two away over coffee, wondering if she should go through with this after all, mulling it over on her own.
She never breaks appointments at the last minute and she’s never late. She’s not secretive and she’s never lied to me and she’s not a coward.
No. Something’s wrong.
You damn well know something’s wrong.
He felt the unreality of it all wash over him and for a moment he felt dizzy, almost as though he were about to faint. Twenty minutes ago he was looking for a place to park, an empty meter, pummeled by guilt at what they were about to do. Now he was walking along peering into storefronts, at people coming out of doorways, pedestrians passing, the pour and turmoil of New York. Searching for a glimpse of her. Walking at what seemed to him a crawl when what he wanted to do was run, look everywhere at once. Police in his life all of a sudden while he’d never had previous occasion to say ten words to a cop. And this cop, this brisk no-nonsense young woman like a lifeline to him now, his only potential link to Sara. He felt a sudden incredible de pendency, as though his life had just spun out of his hands and landed into hers, a stranger’s.
His heart was pounding.
People don’t just vanish. Not unless they want to.
Or unless somebody helps them.
Whether they wanted to or not.
TWO
Sussex, New Jersey
12:30 P.M.
She woke in dark and panic.
Her first thought was that they had buried her alive.
That she was in a coffin.
She was lying on her back against rough unfinished wood, thick wood planks to the left of her, to the right of her, so close that she could barely raise her arms to feel that yes, there was more rough wood above, she could smell it. Pine. There was a pillow beneath her head and that was all. Panic raced through her like a breath of fire. She had never been aware of being afraid of tight spaces but she was very afraid of this one.
She balled her hands into fists and pounded. She heard the pounding echo and knew she was in a room then, in some kind of box in some kind of room and not underground at least not buried underground thank god because there would be no echo if that were so but the panic didn’t recede any. She could hear her own fear in the wildness of her heartbeat. She screamed for help. She pounded and kicked at the lid of the thing and side to side at firm unyielding wood and it hurt, they’d removed her shoes and stockings, she was barefoot and it was only then that she realized that her skirt and blouse were gone too, she was wearing only her slip and pan ties. And that fact too was terrifying.
Why? she thought. What am I doing here?
What do they want with me?
It was cold.
She was not underground but it must have been some kind of basement she was in because it was summer, the day was warm and yet in here it was cold.
Where was she?
She was crying. The tears went cold on her face the moment she shed them. Gooseflesh all over her body.
She kicked harder. Kicked until her feet were sore and maybe bleeding and then kicked and pounded again. Her breath came in gasps through the sobbing.
Calm down, she thought. This isn’t doing any good. Think. Control yourself, dammit. Concentrate.
Look for weaknesses.
She had maybe two feet between her chest and the lid above. Maybe she could press the lid off. She raised her arms, took a deep breath and pushed with all her might until her neck was straining, the muscles of her arms and shoulders spasming.
It didn’t budge.
She let go of the breath and rested. Then took another and tried again.
She brought her knees up under her as best she could until they pressed tight against the lid, trying to get more leverage, took a third deep breath and pushed until finally all her strength leeched out of her. She lay back, exhausted.
The footboard and headboard, she thought. Maybe there. She slid down until the soles of her feet touc
hed wood, the slip riding up her thighs and then drew her arms up over her head, the palms of her hands flat against the headboard. She was sweating now despite the cold, a thin clammy film all over her. She pushed and felt the headboard give a quarter inch and then stop. She relaxed immediately and used her fingers to explore it on either side.
She touched metal. The headboard was hinged to the left. That meant there was probably some kind of lock on the outside. Which also meant the headboard was the entrance. How had they gotten her in here?
She lowered her arms and felt around the base of the box opposite her thighs and found a half-inch space between the base and sideboards on either side. On a hunch she pushed off with the soles of her feet and felt the base slide minutely toward the headboard and then stop.
She was on rollers, casters.
They’d rolled her in.
Then locked the headboard behind her.
Somebody had gone to a whole lot of trouble planning this, constructing this. Building this trap for me.
It didn’t change anything knowing that except to scare her further.
Who were these people? Suddenly she was desperate to know.
There was a woman involved. The woman with the needle. She’d been driving. Why would a woman do this to another woman? How could somebody do that?
She willed herself to stop thinking, to go back to the original plan. The lock might give. It was possible.
It didn’t.
She pushed until every muscle in her body was shaking with the strain and that was when the fear set in deep and final so that she lay still, trembling wideeyed in the dark. Because she had no choice then but to accept the fact that there was no way out until they decided to let her out to whatever purpose they had in mind, which could be to no good purpose because here she was. Half naked. In a hand-built coffin. Alone in the swimming dark.
Or maybe not alone.
She heard scratching, light raspings, like claws, something working at the top of the box and growing more and more determined-sounding as she lay there helpless, frozen, listening.
Something wanted in.
A rat?
She took a deep breath and shouted. “HEY!” Why that word she didn’t know. The word simply burst out of her, angry and scared, unnaturally loud in that closed space. Hey! She listened. Waited.