Shadow of Doubt (21 page)

I thought about the phone message that Melissa had just played back.

“But he really loved her. He wanted to find her, and you offered to help.” That had to be it. It was the only way his phone message made sense.

Ms. Rachlis reached for the tape and ripped off a piece. She pressed it over my mouth and slowly stood up.

“Get up,” she said. She grabbed my hair again and jerked me onto my feet. “You too, Melissa. Get up.”

Melissa stumbled to her feet. Ms. Rachlis gripped me from behind and held the knife to my throat again.

“We're going to go down the back stairs and into the basement,” Ms. Rachlis said. “Melissa, you're going to lead the way. If you try anything, if you do anything other than what I tell you to do, Robyn is going to get hurt. Badly. You understand?”

Melissa nodded.

Ms. Rachlis opened the apartment door and we went out into the hall. Ms. Rachlis held tightly to me. The whole way she pressed the knife against my throat. On the last flight of stairs, the one that led down into a dim, unfinished basement, I stumbled and felt the knife slice through my skin. My whole body turned to ice. I felt blood run down my neck. How badly had she cut me?

Ms. Rachlis kept forcing me downward until we reached the basement floor. She pulled a chain that switched on a light. The place was piled with trunks and boxes. A massive oil-burning furnace occupied one whole corner. Ms. Rachlis moved us toward the door next to it, opened the door, and peered inside. The small, dark room smelled musty.

“That'll do,” she said. “Get in there.”

She shoved Melissa in and dragged me by the hair.

“Lie down,” she said. When Melissa hesitated, Ms. Rachlis pressed the knife against my throat. Melissa knelt down. Ms. Rachlis planted one foot on her back and pressed Melissa's face onto the filthy concrete. “You should be grateful to Robyn and that boyfriend of hers,” she said to Melissa. “If they hadn't shown up when they did, Mikhail would be dead, and I would have denied that he was threatening me. I would have told the police that you shot him in cold blood. It would have been your word against mine—and with your past, who do you think they would have believed?” She twisted my hair. “Now you,” she said to me. “Down.”

Ms. Rachlis bound both our ankles with duct tape. Then she closed the door. We heard noises outside, heavy boxes or trunks being dragged and stacked across the front of the door.

Then silence.

. . .

We lay there for a few minutes, neither of us moving, neither of us even able to see in the darkness. Then I felt Melissa squirm up against me. She was breathing hard. My eyes adjusted. I could make her out, but just barely. She was sitting up and nodding her head. At first I couldn't figure out what she was doing. Then I understood: she wanted me to sit up too.

I wriggled my way up to a sitting position. Melissa kept moving her head to one side, but it was only when she shifted around so that her back was to me that I got the idea. I did the same. We pressed our bound hands up against each other. I felt her picking at the tape around my wrists. Picking and picking, but not getting anywhere. She couldn't find the end of the strip, and without that there was no way that she'd be able to get it off. I pushed against her, hard. She went rigid. Then I started picking at her tape. Ms. Rachlis had bound me, but I had bound Melissa. I felt for the edge with my fingernail and found one end of a tape strip. I began to pick at it as best as I could with sore and twisted hands. It was like trying to carry a bucket of water up a mountain one drop at a time. Finally I had an end loose. We both had to maneuver so that I could start to unravel it, bit by aching bit, until her hands pulled free.

“Robyn, are you okay?”

I nodded.

I felt a hand pick at the corner of the tape across my mouth.

“This might hurt,” she said. She pulled the tape from my mouth. Then she worked the tape off my wrists. We freed our ankles.

But we couldn't budge the door.

We shouted.

Nothing.

We threw our shoulders against the door—and were rewarded with bruised shoulders.

“Do you think Ms. Rachlis is still up there?” I said at last.

“I don't know.”

“Do you think she's going to come back down?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't know.”

. . .

Ms. Rachlis didn't come back. After a while we started to pound on the door. We tried everything we could to open it. We kicked it. We pried at it. We kicked it some more. We screamed until we were hoarse.

“It's a sturdy old house,” Melissa said, “and it's so far away from the road and the neighbors' yards. I don't think anyone will hear us—unless one of them happens to come right up to the house, and that hardly ever happens. Mrs. Wyman certainly won't hear us.”

I felt like crying but forced myself to hold my tears in.

“How long do you think we've been down here?” I said.

“I don't know. Over an hour, I think.” She fumbled with her watch—I saw it glow fleetingly. “Three hours. Maybe a little more,” she said, sounding surprised.

“Does Mrs. Wyman have a newspaper delivered to her house?” Worst case, we could wait until morning and try to attract the attention of the newspaper delivery person.

“No,” Melissa said. “And neither do Nat or I.”

I got up and kicked at the door again and again and again, until my foot hurt and my knee was throbbing from the brutal impact of my leg hammering, hammering, hammering into the door.

“Robyn.”

I couldn't stop kicking and kicking.

“Robyn.” Melissa grabbed my arm.

I started to cry. I couldn't help it.

Melissa hugged me.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry I got you caught up in all of this.”

“It's not your fault,” I said. I drew in a deep breath to calm myself. “It's not your fault.”

Melissa was silent for a few moments.

“I trusted her,” she said. “I trusted the wrong person.” She let out a long and shuddering sigh.

“Someone will come looking for us,” she said. She tried to sound upbeat, but it seemed forced to me. “Ted called, didn't he? He'll be worried about you. So will your mother. They'll look for you.”

“They'll look for us,” I said.

“W

hat time is it?” I said.

Melissa checked her watch again. “After midnight.”

We had been sitting on the floor in the tiny room for hours. My stomach was rumbling, but that didn't bother me as much as my dry mouth. I hadn't had anything to drink since morning, before I'd gone shopping. I knew that humans could last for days, even weeks, without food. But water was a different story.

I got up and started feeling my way around the room. Boxes were stacked against one wall. But all they contained were books. Useless. Everything in the small room was utterly useless.

“Someone will find us,” Melissa said. But it sounded more like a wish than a promise.

It was cold in the dark, windowless room. We huddled together, but that didn't help my feet, which were turning to ice. Melissa shivered beside me.

“The house is drafty,” she said, “but the furnace is on. We may be uncomfortable, but we won't freeze.”

“Does Mrs. Wyman ever come down here?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Melissa said.

She didn't come down that night.

No one did.

Every so often we got up and stomped our feet to stay warm. We whooped and shouted, hoping that someone would hear us.

No one did.

. . .

I heard a skittering sound. My eyes shot open. A thought ripped through my brain:
Rats
.

I nudged Melissa.

She jolted awake, but the sound had stopped.

“It's nothing,” I said. “What time is it?”

She peered at her watch.

“Nearly noon.”

Then I heard it again. What I thought was the sound of ratty little feet on concrete was getting fainter and fainter. My first thought was relief. My next thought:
Help! Help! We're here!
I started to pound on the door.

For a moment I heard nothing. Then I heard a welcome sound, barely audible.

“Robbie? Robbie, are you there?”

“Dad! Melissa's here with me.”

We waited, listening to my father shout for someone and then to grunts and bangs as whoever was with him helped clear the door.

Finally, the door swung open and my father stepped into the room. I threw myself into his arms. Ted came in behind him, his eyes afraid until they lit on Melissa and he saw that she was fine. He embraced her.

“I was worried,” Ted said. “We couldn't figure out where you were. You just disappeared.”

“Your mother was frantic,” my father said. “There was a message waiting on my phone when I got in from the airport. She and Ted looked everywhere.”

“Everywhere except the basement,” Ted said sheepishly. “That was Ben's idea.”

“Ben?” I said.

My father nodded over his shoulder. “Your mother called him to see if he'd heard from you. He drove around all night looking for you.”

I spotted Ben's pale face behind my father. He smiled at me.

. . .

Things were chaotic after that. My father called my mom and the police—in that order—and then ushered us all back upstairs to Melissa's apartment to wait for them. Melissa asked if there was any news about Mornov.

“The police told me yesterday, before I called Robyn, that he had regained consciousness,” Ted said. “They've listed his condition as serious, but they're optimistic that he's going to make a good recovery.”

“Thank goodness,” Melissa said. There were tears in her eyes.

My father asked me over and over if I was okay. Only when he seemed satisfied that the nicks on my neck weren't serious and Ted had made us some tea did my dad get around to explaining how they'd found us.

“It was Ben's idea to come back to the house,” he said. “He figured that if Melissa was missing too, the two of you were probably together. We searched the apartment and found your purse in one of the closets. We went up and down the street, talking to all the neighbors again to see if anyone had seen either of you. We found a couple of people we hadn't spoken to last night. One of them thought she saw you walk up the street yesterday afternoon. But no one saw you or Melissa leave the house. Then we spoke to a man who had been out all night. He said that as he was leaving his house last night he saw a taxi come out of Mrs. Wyman's driveway.”

“Nat,” Melissa said.

“Most likely,” my father said. “Anyway, after we had that piece of information, Ben insisted that we search the one place we hadn't checked—the basement.”

I look at him, surprised. “What made you think of that?”

He shrugged. “I remembered you telling me that the woman who lives here is practically deaf. And this house is quite a distance from the road and from the neighboring houses. I thought it was worth a try.”

My dad smiled. “He'd make a terrific police officer.” I got up and went to sit beside Ben. He put his arm around me, and I nestled against him. My dad waited a few moments before he said, “What exactly happened, Robbie?”

. . .

I had just finished telling the whole story to Charlie Hart when someone knocked on the door of the small room where we were sitting. Charlie Hart reached out and switched off the video recorder.

“Excuse me for a minute, Robyn,” he said. He got up and left the room. He was back a minute later. “They arrested Natalie Rachlis in Montreal. She was about to board a plane.”

I sighed in relief.

“I think we're finished for now,” Charlie Hart continued. “I'll let you know if I need to ask you any more questions.”

. . .

Ben was waiting with my parents. He promised them that he'd have me safely back in time for a late dinner. He took me downtown to a fancy restaurant, where we got a seat in the window.

“I thought you'd appreciate a view after being shut up in that basement all night,” he said. He flagged a waiter and ordered hot chocolate for both of us. After the waiter left I pulled out the bag that my dad had retrieved from Ms. Denholm's closet.

“I got you a little something for Valentine's Day,” I said, handing him the chocolates. “And this,” I handed him the other box, “is for your sister.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And I have something for you. I've been carrying it around ever since I picked it up a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to give it to you right away, but...” He reached into his pocket and brought out a small box tied with a white ribbon. He handed it to me.

My fingers trembled as I opened it.

“Oh, Ben,” I said, staring into the box. Nestled in blue velvet was a gold ring set with three pearls. “It's so beautiful. Thank you.”

Ben took the ring from the box and slipped it onto my finger.