I squeezed my eyelids tight against the hot tears building there and bit my tongue, hard.
“That’s a great idea. You know, I think I might take off and go camping with Emma for a few days.”
“See, your mother knows what’s best, but don’t forget to check in and let us know you’re okay. We worry about you, Annie Bear.”
After I hung up the phone I looked around my house, and all I could see was dirt. I rearranged my books alphabetically and washed my walls with bleach and water. The rest of the night I scrubbed the floors on my hands and knees. Not one inch of my house was spared. While my body worked on cleaning, my mind worked to explain it all away.
Just because someone hired The Freak in the past didn’t mean my situation wasn’t random—maybe it was just a friend of his that stopped by the motel. Being in prison at the same time as my uncle didn’t necessarily mean anything. A lot of prisoners were in there and they might never have even met. And if they did, that’s probably how The Freak got this weird obsession about me—he saw all the pictures of my family. Aunt Val might not have mentioned Tamara’s suspension because she was waiting for the council’s final decision, then I disappeared and that overshadowed everything. Good thing they were looking into Mom’s records, because when they didn’t find anything they could concentrate on finding The Freak’s real partner—if he even had one. It was going to be okay.
It wasn’t until seven the next morning, when I finally stopped, that I realized I’d scrubbed my knuckles raw and hadn’t eaten in more than a day. I managed to get down some tea and dry toast.
When Gary called later that afternoon to tell me he was coming by to pick up the elastic hair band and the photo I took from the cabin, I filled him in on my conversation with Mom, including my so-called camping trip. I explained I’d have to call her at least once or she might start wondering, and he said it was okay but to keep the calls brief.
He also suggested I tell Christina and Luke the same story so no one inadvertently screwed things up, and he wanted me to go stay in a motel, but I refused—this shit was bad enough without having to actually leave my home. We agreed I’d hide my car in the backyard and keep a low profile. Luke and Christina had been phoning every day since the second abduction attempt, and Christina offered in an I’m-trying-so-hard-not-to-be-pushy way for me to crash at her place for a while and accepted my “No, thanks” with a big pause, a deep breath, then an “Okay, whatever works for you.” But I knew it was killing her and they’d worry if I just didn’t answer, so I e-mailed them both that I needed to get out of town for a couple of days and hadn’t phoned because I didn’t want to talk to anyone right now—“Sorry, I’m just going through a rough patch.”
No kidding.
For the last few days I’ve been hiding out in my house and using candlelight at night. The closet hasn’t been an issue, because I haven’t been sleeping. I haven’t even gone for a walk—most of the time I cuddle with Emma and cry into her fur.
Once I got in my car, revved it up a few times, called my mom from my cell phone, and made a bunch of static noise. I told her I was okay but I was driving and my phone was cutting out so I couldn’t talk. Least that part wasn’t a lie—I was barely able to say hello without choking from the effort of keeping everything inside.
When I checked my e-mail, Christina had written that she hoped the time away helped and that I felt better when I came back. “I’ll miss you,” she wrote. She signed the message with xxx’s, ooo’s, and a little smiley face icon.
The next day I spotted her car heading down my driveway and wrapped my hand around Emma’s muzzle before she could bark. Christina walked around outside for a couple of minutes, then drove away. When I looked out I realized she’d picked up all the newspapers that were cluttering the doorstep. I felt like such a jerk.
Gary called to tell me things were progressing and he appreciated my cooperation. I wondered if he was excited about closing in on the “bad guy.” He’s a cop for a reason.
I didn’t tell him I was still planning on coming to my shrink appointment today—he would have just told me not to—and I was glad I hadn’t canceled when he called around eight this morning to tell me they finally located the other maid at the hotel. And yes, she did remember the woman wearing sunglasses—the car was so big and the woman was so small, she had to struggle to push the car door open.
“I know what you’re thinking, Gary, but there must be…Shit, just give me a minute here.”
“I’m really sorry, Annie, but all the evidence is pointing to your mom. We’re just waiting for her bank records before we bring her in for questioning. Meanwhile, we—”
“But you don’t know for sure it was her at the hotel. So it was a small woman, that doesn’t mean—”
“It was a small blond woman, Annie. The maid never got a license plate, but the car was bronze-colored, just like your stepfather’s, and she identified a photo of your mother.”
My blood roared in my ears.
“But I told you, my aunt looks like her and she drives a Lincoln, it’s the same color as the Caddie. Maybe she’s working with her stepbrother and that’s who tried to grab me. He could be blackmailing her—fuck, I don’t know. But he’s still out there and if you just talk to Wayne, he’ll tell you Mom had nothing to do with this.”
“When we’re ready, we’ll bring Wayne in.”
“When you’re ready? What the hell are you waiting for, me to go missing again?”
“Annie, I understand you’re frustrated—”
“I’m not fucking frustrated, I’m furious. You guys are totally off track. If you’re not going to do anything, then I’m going to talk to Wayne and—”
“Get yourself hurt? That would really help, wouldn’t it?”
“Wayne’s not going to do anything to me, he’s an idiot but he doesn’t have a violent cell in his body. Wire me if you’re so worried.”
“This isn’t a Law and Order episode, Annie, we don’t wire civilians, and you’re not trained for this—say one wrong thing and you screw up the case you’re so anxious to solve.”
“Please, Gary, for a whole year I couldn’t do one damn thing up there to help myself. I need to be a part of this. I know Wayne. If Mom told him anything about her stepbrother, I can get it out of him.”
“Sorry, not negotiable. You’re just going to have to be patient. I have to head to court now, I’ll call you later.”
“Okay, okay.”
I glanced at my clock. Eight-fifteen a.m. In two hours Wayne would be sitting down alone at the diner he goes to every morning when he doesn’t have a job, which is most mornings—Mom never goes because she’s usually sleeping off her hangover. Yeah, sure, I’d be patient, for about an hour and forty-five minutes.
Most of the morning rush at the diner had cleared out, but the scent of bacon grease still hung in the air as I slid into a booth right in front of the window.
A waitress came over with a note pad and pencil. The pencil had teeth marks in it and her nails were chewed to the quick. Like mine. I wondered what made her nervous.
“What can I get you?”
“Just a coffee for now.”
“Oh, I know you—you’re Wayne’s daughter, Annie, aren’t you? How you doing, sweetie?”
The tape recorder burned in my pocket. What the hell was I doing here? What if Gary was right and I screwed everything up?
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Wayne should be in any minute. I’ll tell him you’re here, okay, hon?”
“That’d be great.”
She brought the coffee, and no sooner had she left my table than I heard the door jingle. I couldn’t see over the booth unless I stood up or peeked around the side, but I didn’t need to do either.
“How’s the best-looking waitress in town, Janie?”
“Just fine, handsome. Guess who beat you here.”
My stepfather came around the corner of the booth.
“Holy crap, Annie—what are you doing
here? Your mom said something about you going on a holiday.”
The waitress came back with another coffee. Wayne sat down across from me.
I said, “I had to go talk to the cops again. That’s why I came back early.”
He nodded and stirred his coffee.
“They have some more information about the guy who abducted me.” He lifted the spoon mid-stir.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Maybe we should get some air,” I said. “It’s hot as hell in here—why don’t we get coffees to go, then we can sit in the park?”
“I don’t know, your mom’s going to be up soon and I was supposed to bring her a pack of smokes.”
“We don’t have to be all day, I just don’t want to go home yet. Got your cards with you?”
“You want to play?”
“Sure, but let’s go to the park. I need to get out of here, smells like someone burned some toast.”
I paid our tab, Janie got us a couple of fresh coffees to go, and we headed across the street to the park. I found us a picnic table in the shade, away from the other ones. Wayne shuffled the deck. I tried to remember our ever doing anything else together, alone.
“To be honest, Wayne, it wasn’t an accident I ran into you.” He paused with the deck in hand, about to deal. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Yeah?”
I kicked Gary out of my head and plunged. “The cops think Mom had something to do with me being abducted. Someone saw a car like your Caddy at a hotel where that guy was staying, but I think—”
“Lots of people have cars like mine.”
“I know, but apparently the maid’s description—”
“The cops have it wrong.”
I stared at him. He stared at the cards.
“Look at me, Wayne.”
“Thought you wanted to play—”
“Just look at me.” He raised his head slowly and met my eyes.
“Do you know something?”
He shook his head.
“Wayne, they have a warrant, they’re getting Mom’s bank records.”
His face paled.
My voice was calm but my ears were roaring again.
“Does Mom have something to do with this?”
For about five seconds he tried to keep eye contact. Then he put his head in his hands, and I saw them shaking.
“Wayne. You have to tell me what’s going on.”
“It’s all fucked up, so fucked up.” He was mumbling. “Shit, what a mess….”
“WAYNE!”
Head still in his hands, he shook it back and forth.
“You tell me now, Wayne, or I call the cops and you tell them.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, we didn’t know he liked to hurt girls—I swear.” He looked up at me with desperate eyes. “I would have stopped her anyway, I would have, but I didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“You know, that your mom was going to have that guy…take you.”
No, no, no, no.
Across the park a young mother pushed her toddler on a swing set. The little girl was squealing and giggling. The sound was muffled by the roaring in my ears. Wayne’s lips were moving up and down, but all I caught were broken words, fragments of sentences. I tried to focus on what he was saying, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the little wheels on the tape recorder going around and around.
He stared at my face. “Shit, Annie, you look like…I don’t know.”
I stared back at him, shaking my head slowly. “You guys. It was you guys….”
He leaned in and started talking fast. “You’ve got to hear my side, Annie. It got all fucked up. But I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t know. When you first got taken, your mom seemed kind of calm about it all, you know? Wasn’t like her, I thought she’d be going ape-shit. But after you’d been gone over a week she started pacing at night and going through booze like shit through a goose. The second week she went to see your uncle like three times, so I came right out and said, ‘What kind of trouble you in, Lorraine?’ All she keeps saying is, ‘It’s not my fault.’” He swallowed a couple of times and cleared his throat.
“What wasn’t her fault? You still haven’t told me exactly what it is she did!”
“You were just supposed to disappear for like a week or something, but it didn’t go right.”
It didn’t go right. That’s all, it just didn’t go right. I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
“No shit. Why the hell was I supposed to be abducted in the first place? Was The Freak blackmailing Dwight or something? Or was Dwight threatening Mom? Has she always visited him? What the fuck happened, Wayne?”
“I don’t know what the deal is with Dwight—she gets all weird when I ask about him. But no, she saw a movie about some girl who got kidnapped for two days, and after the movie they did one of those interview things with the real family…you know, she gets these ideas and she’s on them like a pit bull on a steak.”
I connected the dots. “Mom got the idea to have me abducted from a movie?”
“Lorraine, she said you were way prettier, and if you were gone a whole week it would be worth more.”
It took a moment for Wayne’s words to sink in. “Worth more—are you fucking telling me she did this for money?”
“It started when she heard you might not get that project. Val was going to roast her over the coals when she found out—you know those two—but if you were famous? Val would have to eat shit for the rest of her life.”
“And you had no idea what she was up to?”
“Shit, no! I swear I didn’t know anything. She said your uncle knew a guy from jail who could do it, also he knew the loan shark who lent her the thirty-five grand—I didn’t know nothing about that, either.”
“Thirty-five fucking grand? That’s how much it cost to ruin my life. Some goddamn family I have.”
“Your mom didn’t mean for you to get hurt. The man, he never called her when he was supposed to—that’s why she was so upset after the first week. Your uncle put feelers out, but no one knew where the guy had taken you.”
“But why didn’t she call the cops when I didn’t come home? Why didn’t you? You guys just left me there….” My voice broke.
“As soon as I found out what went down, I told her we should tell the cops right away, but the guy she borrowed money from said the cops would come looking for him if she opened her mouth, then he’d slash her face and break my legs. He said he could have Dwight killed in prison. We told him we’d say we paid with our own dough, but he still wanted his money back—he was never going to get it if your mom and I were in the slammer. And if we did go to jail, he said he’d just get us in there.”
I realized this was probably the longest conversation I’d ever had with my stepdad, our first heart-to-heart, and we were talking about my mom having me kidnapped and raped.
“Weren’t you worried that I was being hurt? That I might be killed?”
His face looked miserable. “Every damn day, but there was nothing I could do. If I tried to help you, Lorraine was going to get hurt. When you were missing she was buying time with the loan shark with the money she got from selling your stuff and trying to get someone to make a movie, but nothing was coming through. We were just about dry when you came home.”
He took a deep breath. “After I saw you in the hospital I was messed right up, but Lorraine said we had to just move on and be strong for you. And we still had the loan shark breathing down our necks. Lorraine told him she’d get some money when you sold your story, but you kept shutting her down. She was trying like hell to make sure the media still gave a shit.” I flashed to all the times the reporters seemed to know exactly where I was and how right from the beginning they knew inside information.
“Any money they gave us went on our debt. But a month or so ago the guy said we had to pay in full or he was coming for us.”
“Wait a minute, the man who tried to grab me off the street. Was
that the loan shark or Dwight?”
Wayne stared down at his feet.
“Did you guys hire someone to fucking abduct me again?”
“No.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him. “It was me.”
“You? Jesus Christ, Wayne, you scared the shit out of me, you hurt me.”
He turned to face me and started talking fast. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to. You weren’t supposed to fall—I didn’t know you’d fight that hard. Your mom, she said the media was losing interest. We didn’t have any other options, we were fucked, Annie.”
“You were fucked? No, Wayne, fucked is being raped almost every night. Fucked is having to struggle and cry and scream because it got him off faster. Fucked is having to pee on a schedule. Do you know what he did when he caught me sneaking a pee? He forced me to drink water from the toilet bowl. From the toilet bowl, Wayne. People don’t even let their dogs do that. That’s fucked.”
Tears in his eyes, Wayne just kept nodding.
“My daughter died, Wayne.” I reached over, took one of his hands in mine, and flipped it over. “Her head wasn’t even bigger than the palm of your hand, and she’s dead. And you’re telling me my family did this to me? You’re the ones I’m supposed to be able to trust the most, and you—”
Then I heard myself, and it all hit.
Doubled over, I hugged my legs as an enormous pressure bore down on my chest and my head felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. I sucked in big gulps of air while Wayne patted my back and said over and over again how sorry he was. He sounded like he was crying. The edges of my vision darkened. I felt my body slide forward.
Wayne threw his arm around me and held me in place. “Oh, shit, Annie, don’t pass out on me.”
After a few minutes I got my breathing under control, but I still felt shaky and cold all over. I brought my head up and shrugged Wayne’s arm off. I took another deep breath, then got to my feet and paced in front of the bench, hugging myself.
“Did you guys break into my house, too?”
“Yeah, your mom was going to come in right behind me and save you, but I got to your bedroom and you weren’t there, the alarm was going off, and I bailed out the window. Then when your mom stayed the night at your house, you told her when you ran in the mornings….” The night my mom brought me Annie Bear cookies and my photos. I sat back down.