Strangers (25 page)

Faye had been studiously avoiding the thought of bathroom necessities.

“On the second day, I tried to crawl around him and get through the door while it was still open. He grabbed me by the arm and just that little tug twisted my ribs. I screamed. I couldn’t help myself. And I saw that the door was still open a bit and I thought the noise might get out. So I screamed and screamed, long after the door closed off the chance that somebody might hear. But the door closed and then he cried, because he saw that he’d hurt me.”

“What a prince,” Magda mumbled.

“He started thinking out loud about how maybe he should gag me, but that I’d have to wear the gag twenty-four hours a day, just to keep me quiet for those seconds that the door was opening and closing. He looked deep in my eyes and explained things to me.”

As Glynis spoke, she stared high into the turret, where the ceiling should be. “Since it would hurt him to think of me bound and gagged around the clock, he was just going to start carrying a knife. ‘Just so we understand each other,’ he said, ‘my first priority has got to be the baby. If you scream when I come through that door, I can’t afford to kill you, but I
will
hurt you. Think about this rationally. There’s nobody outside that door. Everyone is asleep on the far side of this big house. It’s not possible for someone to hear you scream, but if you try, I will cut you. If you scream again, I’ll do it again. Do you really want that?’ Since then, he’s always got a butcher knife in his hand when he comes here.”

Faye thought of the hole in Lex’s throat. However mildly Daniel had behaved in his role as Glynis’ jailer, none of them needed to forget that the man’s madness could cross the line into murderous violence. It had happened before. If they tried to escape and failed, then it could happen again.

Her eyes landed on Magda, sitting with her arms curled around her child. Faye, Glynis, Rachel—they all enjoyed some immunity from Daniel’s madness, because they all gave Daniel the ability to give his wife the child she craved.

Magda, on the other hand…Faye figured that Daniel had only taken her so that Rachel would go quietly.

Magda was expendable.

Chapter Twenty-four

Joe looked Suzanne up and down and decided that the best way to escort her down the street was to simply walk very closely at her side. Throwing her over his shoulder would have attracted attention. Even guiding her with a hand on her waist ran the risk of looking inappropriate. If Suzanne decided to run, Joe knew that his long arms and lightning reflexes wouldn’t fail him. But she didn’t.

They walked to the end of the street, so slowly that it twanged Joe’s nerves to a high-pitched hum, but they got there. Victor, sitting in his customary watchdog position at the window, rushed out to meet them, burbling words of welcome.

Joe cut him off. “I need to talk to Faye.”

“Ah, Faye, she’s so lovely. What a beautiful mother she will make—”

“Where is she?” Joe stood in the doorway of Victor’s home, looking at its single empty room.

Victor’s face was utterly vacant. There was no information there about Faye, no information about where she was, no information on whether she was okay, no information on whether she was even…

Joe reached out and grabbed Victor’s shoulders. The urge to shake the truth out of the old man was so strong, but he remained in control. There was no one home behind Victor’s sad eyes. Or, if there was anyone remaining in that feeble brain, there was only a little boy who could not be blamed for any looming disaster.

“Where is she?” Victor asked, but Joe couldn’t tell whether he was asking the question or just echoing the last thing he’d heard.

Joe whipped his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Overstreet. He said “Do you know where Faye is?” instead of saying hello.

The rising tones of Overstreet’s questions mirrored Joe’s skyrocketing worry.

The officer’s first response was “No, I don’t.
Should
I know where she is?”

His second response was, “What do you mean she dialed 911? From Dunkirk Manor? If there’s trouble there and nobody’s called me, there’ll be hell to pay.”

And his concerned tone reached its peak with “
Why
did she call 911? Faye wouldn’t do that without a serious reason. And when did she call? Is anybody there yet?”

Time expanded and contracted for Joe. The first slow elevator ride. The search of the room where he’d thought he’d find Magda. The encounter with Suzanne. The second slow elevator ride down. The slow walk down the street. The interminable moment spent looking in Victor’s eyes, knowing that the addled old man could do nothing to help him find the woman that he loved. The mother of his child…

He couldn’t get his brain around how long any of these things had taken. He just didn’t know.

“I don’t know how long it’s been since she called to report Magda missing. Fifteen minutes, easy. Maybe half an hour. Maybe more.”

“Then nobody called 911, or they’d be there already. I’ll double-check on my way over and I’ll get the emergency vehicles over there. Now.”

“No. Wait.”

Joe wished for Faye to be here, with her sober and flawless logic. But she was not. All Joe had on his side was his own hunter’s intuition.

Joe knew predators. He knew how their minds worked. It was time to put that knowledge to work.

“Maybe we don’t want a bunch of sirens surrounding the house just yet. Not until we know where Faye is. And the other women. Faye has to be in Dunkirk Manor, or on the grounds somewhere. Unless she got out the front door and someone kidnapped her on the street.” He refused to voice the possibility that she had gone over the garden wall and into the river. He clung to the hope that, in mid-morning, someone would have seen it happening and stopped it.

Joe looked at Victor, who shook his head. “No cars on the street this morning except the cook and maids coming to work. They drove into the parking lot. Nobody’s came out of the house at all. Nobody’s drove away.” His ancient vocal cords gave the words a shrieking, grinding sound, like failing brakes on a collision-bound car.

“Then Faye’s still in the house. Magda and Rachel are still in there, too,” Joe said.

“Considering how much time Victor spends looking down this street,” Overstreet offered, “Glynis is more than likely still in there, too.”

Joe turned to Victor. “You never saw her leave, did you?”

Victor shook his head hard.

“We can’t go in that house looking for them until we’ve got Daniel under control.” Joe found that he was thinking of Daniel as he would think of a mother bear, who might turn and make a stand before letting anyone take her cubs.

“We don’t want to scare him into hurting them, or holing up with them in whatever secret places he’s got them hidden.”

“Exactly.”

“Joe,” Overstreet said. “Are you absolutely sure Daniel did this? We don’t have many other plausible in-house suspects, but there are the two men who work for you. And the household staff. And the guests. We need to get them all out of the house, not just Daniel. Ask Suzanne where they keep their evacuation plan.”

Joe asked her.

“There’s a copy in my desk. Another posted by the kitchen door and by the emergency exits in the guest wing.”

Joe felt the plan unfold in his head. As it did, he told Overstreet how things were going to go. If this irritated the policeman’s professional sensibilities, then that was just too bad.

“Okay, here’s how we do this. You get your people in place, but don’t let Daniel know. He could take hostages. He’s already
got
hostages. We have to get him out of the house before he takes more, and we need people with rifles hidden all around the house in case we don’t manage it. But he can’t know they’re there.”

“Agreed.”

“You and I can go into the house, because we have an excuse to be there. But nobody else. We don’t want to tip him off.”

“Also agreed.”

Victor had shyly taken Suzanne by the hand and taken her into a corner of the room to look at his collection of silver dimes. Joe was okay with this, because he was standing between them and the door, but he kept an eye on them both.

At the same time, he was still spinning his plan for Overstreet to hear. “Next, we get Daniel away from everybody else and out of there, before he has a chance to disappear to wherever he has the women hidden. Can you ask him to go with you to the station or something like that?”

“I’ll tell him that we’ve…um…constructed a timeline of Glynis’ activities during the week before she was taken. I’ll say that, as her employer, we need him to come downtown to check it over and see whether he thinks it’s accurate.”

“That’ll work. Once he’s gone, I guess I’ll pull the fire alarm and get everyone else out of the house. If he gives us any trouble, well…we have the snipers. And the women will be out of his reach, once he’s outside. Then we can search the place from top to bottom. If you people at the police department can get hold of some equipment that can detect secret rooms, it would help. I don’t know…x-ray, maybe…”

“No.” Suzanne looked up from Victor’s coin collection. “Nobody’s pulling the fire alarm and throwing my guests into a panic. I’ll tell the staff that we’re doing a fire drill. They’ll get everyone out of the house and gather them up so that we’ll know exactly where they all are, but they’ll be very clear that it’s just a drill. I’m not willing to risk the safety of my guests, not when there’s a way to get them out of the house that’s just as efficient as your way. A lot of them are old. They’ll get hurt or have heart attacks or…no. I’m not willing to risk anyone else’s safety because of what my husband has done.”

Joe looked at the slim woman. The events of the morning had left her swaying on her feet. This actually wasn’t a bad plan, but could she be trusted? Was she stable enough to do this, and had she really been so easily convinced of Daniel’s guilt? Was she willing to lay a trap for her own husband?

She saw the concern on his face, and she answered him. “I’ve known something was wrong with Daniel all week. I’ve blamed it on worry over Glynis, but something just wasn’t right—something deep and ugly that he couldn’t tell me about. There’s always been a part of Daniel that I couldn’t reach. Since Annie…that part has nearly taken him over.”

She looked at Joe and read his doubts. “We’ve been married twenty-seven years,” she said as if that explained everything.

Joe had been married a year, and that was long enough for him to know the depth of the marriage bond. The part of him that knew when Faye had a headache, before she said so, believed that Suzanne had sensed Daniel’s deception.

“His response to Glynis’ disappearance has been just…wrong,” she said. “He’s ordinarily a very protective man, very concerned about women, but he’s been very brisk and businesslike about this, until I cry. Then he freaks out, saying ‘She’s fine, baby, she’s fine. I just know it. You can’t tear yourself up this way.’”

She looked at Joe and Victor as if she’d just offered inarguable proof. Joe was trying to think of a nice way to ask her to be more convincing.

Again, she saw his doubts, so she tried. “It’s like someone took my husband and put someone else in his bed…in his body. He paces. He hovers over me and asks if I’m okay about twelve times a day. He’s taken a midnight walk every night since Glynis has been gone. He never does that.”

Joe thought the midnight walk was marginally more convincing evidence. Daniel had to visit Glynis sometime, to take her food and water and make sure she was okay.

Suzanne seemed to sense that she was making better headway with Joe by giving him documentable facts instead of feelings, so she plunged ahead. “The maids told me yesterday that several blankets have gone missing.”

Joe nodded. Blankets could be counted and Glynis needed something to sleep under. This was a reasonable clue for Suzanne to hang her suspicions on.

Then she returned to the realm of intuition, but she went to a particularly bone-chilling part of that realm. “The day after Glynis disappeared, Daniel started telling me that he thinks maybe we can adopt after all, even though we gave up on that years ago. ‘I just feel in my heart that we can get a newborn. And maybe a brother or sister, too…an older child, instead of an infant,’ he said.”

So he’d had his eye on Rachel for days.

“Other times, it’s something like, ‘It would probably be easier to get a baby who wasn’t white…biracial, maybe.’”

The man had been calmly discussing the kidnapping of his child. Faye’s child. Joe felt his heart turn to iron.

“It all adds up.” Suzanne squared her thin shoulders. “I know Daniel. Sometimes I know him better than I know myself. I believe I know what he has done. I care deeply for Glynis and we have to do whatever it takes to find her. And Faye. And that poor little girl and her mother. Let’s stop wasting time and just do it.”

***

It had taken the better part of an hour for Glynis, drifting in and out of consciousness, to tell Faye and Magda about Daniel’s creative methods to keep her captive and alive. Or at least Faye thought it had been an hour.

Time didn’t mean very much in the dim light of Dunkirk Manor’s tiny prison. It was possible that the angle of light coming through the tiny windows high at the top of the turret had changed, but Faye couldn’t tell. She couldn’t even bring herself to care much, and this worried her. Curiosity and attention to detail had saved her life in the past, and she couldn’t let them fail her now.

“He brings food and water in a brown paper grocery bag. There’s always one plate of hot food—leftovers that he warmed up in the kitchen—and a bunch of protein bars. Lots and lots of vitamins in protein bars…” Her voice took on a mocking edge. “He’s very concerned about my health. Since I’m making his baby and all. See the medicine bottles over there? Prenatal vitamins, plus an extra bottle of Vitamin D. Because he knows I’m sure as hell not getting any sunshine in here.”

Faye was actually glad to hear the anger in Glynis’ voice. They were all going to need some fight in them today. Because Faye did not intend to sit here for a month, eating protein bars and waiting to have her baby, so she could die.

Glynis wrapped her arms even tighter around herself and clenched her fists harder. Faye wouldn’t have thought that possible. “How many nights have I been here?”

“You were taken on Tuesday morning,” Faye said. “It’s Saturday morning now.”

“So that’s four nights.” Glynis looked like she was trying to remember a series of nights that had all been the same, trying to count them and make them her own. “He brings a fresh bucket of water every night, so I can wash my face and hands, and he leaves it, so I can have a wet cloth to help keep me cool in the daytime. It takes him two trips—in with the bag of food and maybe some blankets or whatever. Then out with the bedpan. And then back in with the clean bedpan and the bucket of water.”

Faye was thinking, and she was very glad that her brain had returned. Tonight, there would be two able-bodied women waiting for Daniel…well, one able-bodied woman and Faye.

“A little at a time, he keeps bringing me stuff to make this place liveable. A couple of nights, it was blankets and towels and a pillow to fluff up my bed. One night he brought me some books.” Glynis pointed to a stack of paperback novels that probably came out of the bed-and-breakfast’s library. “Today, he brought an iPod, loaded it with this week’s Top 40.” A wry smile peeked through. “I like metal. Suzanne would have known that. That’s why I think she has no idea what he’s done.”

“That’s useful information. Not sure what we can do with it, but it’s good to know that he’s working alone.” Magda patted the sleeping Rachel’s head. “I suspected it already, though. A woman would have done a better job of making this cell homelike for the mother of her child. Suzanne’s so domesticated that she would’ve been knitting you some doilies for this charming little apartment.”

“I’m so glad…no, relieved…that Suzanne didn’t do this to me.” Glynis reached up a hand to twiddle with her hair. “She’s been almost like a mother since I came to work for her. I was so little when Mom died. I’m worried about Suzanne. She’s sleeping beside a crazy man who’s capable of…well, look around you.”

Faye didn’t want to look around her. She wanted to come up with a plan to get all four of them out of this hellhole.