Strangers (28 page)
Daniel reached down and yanked a blanket from beneath Glynis, who shrieked in pain. Using the knife to slash the blanket into strips, he said, “You will all
sit still
while I tie you up, and somebody is going to tell me where the little girl is
right now
or…”
He waved the knife at Magda, and Faye prayed that he didn’t finish his sentence, because if Rachel heard him say, “…or I will kill her mother,” then nothing would keep the little girl in her pit. Not even Faye’s substantial weight on the trap door would do it.
“I
heard
you make that noise,” he raved at Faye, still slicing fabric. “Do you want to bring this whole thing down around my ears?”
Well, yes. Faye did, and Daniel should know it. But this man was not rational now, if he ever had been. The fact that he’d taken the risk of entering this room in the daytime, knowing that he’d have to risk being seen when he left…these things told her that the situation had reached an ignition point.
Daniel went down on his knees and reached for Magda with his right hand. In his left hand, he held a knife.
With a wordless glance, Joe and Overstreet agreed to cover Daniel by splitting up. Overstreet put the lie to his tubby frame by taking the atrium stairs two at a time. If Daniel had gotten on the elevator to go to his apartment, Overstreet would be waiting for him when it opened. If he’d, for some reason, gone to the third floor, then Joe and Overstreet couldn’t cover him. But he’d have to come down through the second and first floors to get out, and they’d be waiting for him.
Joe crossed the atrium, reaching for the door to the entry hall. If Daniel was still in there, Joe intended to subdue him. If he’d gotten out the front door, there were officers with rifles waiting out there for him.
Daniel was trapped. There was no place for him to go. Still, Joe cursed the inattention that had brought them to this point. Not inattention, actually—they had made their mistake by role-playing too well. When Suzanne had appeared, both he and Overstreet had hurried across the atrium to shake her hand, instinctively covering the fact that they weren’t at all surprised to see her.
Daniel, looking for a chance to flee, had lingered at the door behind them and taken that opportunity. He’d had no way of knowing that Joe and Overstreet were onto him, so he’d expected them to wait patiently for him, sipping coffee with Suzanne in the dining room. So while he might have hoped to gain ten or fifteen minutes—to do what? Joe couldn’t think about it—he had in fact only gained a few seconds.
Because it only took a few seconds for Joe to cross the atrium, open the door…
…and find the entry hall empty.
The elevator was sitting open, so Daniel had not boarded it. Joe flung open the front door. The officers waiting so unobtrusively in their parked cars were still sitting there, waiting for something to happen. No fugitive had fled out the front door.
Daniel had walked into this room and simply evaporated.
Joe wasted a few seconds by sticking his head into the atrium and calling to Suzanne, “He didn’t go upstairs. Get Overstreet and tell him that Daniel’s somewhere down here.”
The entry hall was a hollow cube of polished wood. It shouldn’t be empty, but it was. Joe stood in the center of the cube and tried to make sense of what he’d just seen.
Where was Daniel? And where was Faye?
Faye had been trying to reach him with that funny little noise. He knew it.
He called out to her. “Faye. I know you’re here.”
Nothing.
“Help me find you!”
Nothing. No voice. No faint clicking. Nothing.
He looked up at the balcony, lined with old and beautiful books. The noise he’d heard had been closer at hand. And Daniel had not had time to climb those stairs and vanish. Faye was down here on the ground floor somewhere.
Joe began checking the elevator carefully for latches that might open into a hidden shaft beyond the elevator shaft. Maybe the elevator didn’t take up the entire turret.
Overstreet appeared, and Joe said, “They’re here. Somewhere near this room. And he’s with them. Get some tools. We need to take this elevator apart.”
Overstreet rushed out the front door. Joe crawled all over the floor, running his hands over the ornate inlaid wood, praying for some sign of a trap door. The carpentry was flawless, without a single seam wide enough to shove even a piece of typing paper into. Pounding on every square inch of that flawless floor yielded no hollow sound to hint at a space beneath.
Joe stood and yanked priceless artworks from the walls, throwing them in a corner. He worked his way around the room, tapping and rubbing his hands on the sleek oak. The wood was adorned with ornate moldings and raised panels. To Joe’s sensitive hands, each piece of carved wood felt seamlessly joined to the next one.
It was hard to believe that this woodwork had withstood a century in such good shape. Maybe it had been restored. Maybe during the restoration someone had taken the opportunity to add a secret room. Or maybe the secret room had been there the whole time.
All of the panels around the room were identical and perfect. All of them were the same…except for one.
Just to the right of the grandfather clock, Joe found a single seam almost concealed by the grain of the wood. Two feet to the right of this seam was another seam, and this one was slightly out of line. If he ran his thumbnail horizontally in front of him, it caught on the slightly raised panel to the right of the second seam. The two-foot panel was slightly depressed on that side, which made it feel to Joe like a door that was slightly ajar. Very, very slightly ajar. Like maybe a millimeter ajar.
It wasn’t much. It was infinitesimal, actually. But maybe it could be more.
Joe backed up and prepared to use his shoulder as a battering ram.
***
Daniel had taken his sweet time in binding Magda’s hands and feet. Faye had felt the contraction in her belly ebb, but she didn’t dare interfere with Daniel’s work. The knife was rarely far from a vulnerable part of Magda’s anatomy—throat, heart, belly. Glynis lay on the floor, eyes closed and sobbing, but Faye couldn’t make herself look away from Magda.
Magda’s eyes caught Faye’s. Then they twitched slightly in the direction of the door.
Making sure Daniel wasn’t looking at her, Faye sneaked a glance. Then she blessed her friend’s presence of mind and sheer cussedness. Despite the fact that Daniel’s appearance had been a total surprise, Magda had managed to execute one part of their plan. She had shoved the water bottle cap into the doorframe.
Faye knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d never known anyone else with Magda’s clear-headedness and strength of will. No one else other than Faye herself, that is.
There was just a teeny problem. The slamming of the heavy door had obliterated the bottle cap. Bits of plastic protruded from the gap between door and frame, but Faye had no confidence that enough plastic had jammed into that gap to keep the door from closing and latching.
Worse, the door opened inward, so even if it hadn’t latched, they were going to have to figure how to pry it open. This was going to be a problem, once they were all trussed up like turkeys. If it had opened the other way, Faye and Magda could have taken turns running into the door like little battering rams, but they hadn’t been that lucky.
***
Inside the entry hall’s concrete wall was a delicate but strong latch, designed to guard a secret room and its secret contents. When firmly engaged, the door was so sturdy that it might as well have been a part of the wall. But a tiny sliver of plastic jammed into the door opening had interfered just enough to stop it short of closing. Not far short, perhaps. The distance was vanishingly small between the door as it was now and the door as it was when it was closed. But that distance was enough.
***
A body the size of Joe’s carries a good bit of momentum with it when it careens full speed into another large object, like a heavy door. Bracing himself, he crashed hard into the concealed entry. Nothing happened.
He did it again. Nothing happened.
He backed up to try again, wishing like hell that Faye would give him some kind of sign. If she would only answer him. He had been calling for her since Daniel vanished, but there was no answer, not even that faint metallic clicking.
He hit the door again, and the impact rattled the keys in his pocket. Hearing Faye call his name, telling him she was alive, would be the best possible thing to happen at this moment. But it didn’t happen.
Joe was very clear about the second best possible thing that could happen. He needed this door to open, or at least to budge a tiny bit. And it did. When his bruised shoulder struck the door, again, he felt motion. The door only swung a millimeter in the right direction, but it did swing.
Joe backed up so he could throw himself at a nearly solid wall, one more time.
***
The door shuddered. Daniel, crouching beside Magda as he finished tying her bonds, whipped his head in that direction. He had the presence of mind to maintain his grip on the knife, but he took his eyes off his hostages.
In the case of hostages like Magda and Faye, this was a big mistake.
In a heartbeat, Faye was on her knees, going for the knife and knocking Daniel onto his butt in the process.
Magda did her part by headbutting him in the mouth. Then she rolled onto her side, so that she could use her powerful but bound legs, mermaid-style, to pound him in the stomach. This approach would have worked, if Daniel hadn’t had the reflexes of a lifelong tennis player. He, too, rolled onto his side, taking the blow on his hip, instead of his vulnerable abdomen.
Taking this defensive posture, instead of grabbing or striking at Magda, left Daniel with one free arm. He wrapped it around Faye’s throat, and squeezed hard.
Faye’s mouth gaped open as she struggled for air. Magda backed off.
The door shuddered again. Faye thought she could hear someone shouting outside, but she couldn’t answer with Daniel’s arm squeezing her windpipe shut. How much longer could she stay conscious?
Even more importantly—how was this affecting the baby? Maybe her best plan was to go ahead and “pass out.” If she feigned unconsciousness, Daniel would probably quit choking her and her baby could keep getting oxygen.
As she closed her eyes and went limp, she heard two things. She heard Daniel announce, “I am getting out of here, and this woman is going to help me do it.”
And she heard the door shake and vibrate yet again.
“Wake up, Faye.” He poked her earlobe with the knife. “You and I are walking out of here. You and me and the little girl.” He poked the lobe again, and she felt a trickle of blood drip onto her neck. “You need to tell me where the little girl is. Right now.”
She thought of Rachel, cowering beneath the trapdoor under Faye’s feet.
Stay put, baby. Please stay put.
Still feigning unconsciousness, Faye let her eyes open a crack. Magda was still bound and gagged, but she wasn’t hurt. Rachel was still hiding. And Glynis still lay on her pallet, ignored by their assailant. He’d written her off as so very helpless that he’d turned his back on her.
This was another big mistake.
Glynis’ eyes were no longer closed. They had the bright cunning of a cornered panther.
With an effort that brought an agonized scream from her pale mouth, Glynis rose to a half-sitting position, reached her right hand over Daniel’s shoulder, and yanked at the knife with all her strength. It clattered to the floor and Magda used her mermaid legs to kick it across the room.
But Glynis wasn’t finished with her captor. Daniel’s head jerked back and Faye felt his arm grip her harder for a timeless time, then relax. She scuttled on hands and knees to the knife, but she couldn’t grab it. Another contraction, bigger than the last, had seized her. Nauseated and terrified, she looked down at the knife and an old wives’ tale popped into her brain.
“If you put a knife under your laborin’ bed, you’ll cut your pain in half.”
A guttural sound from Daniel forced her to look up. Eyes bulging, he clawed at the silvery garrote encircling his neck, but this only made Glynis pull harder.
The door shuddered again.
Daniel was fighting for air, but his brain clearly hadn’t shut down yet. He had the presence of mind to fight the instinct to yank the garrote from his throat, because anyone could see that it wasn’t going anywhere. Instead, he grabbed for Faye. Nearly immobilized by the contraction, there wasn’t much Faye could do about it other than throwing herself to the floor, hoping she could slither out of Daniel’s reach.
Glynis responded to Daniel’s attack on Faye by crossing the ends of the garrote and pulling it even tighter. When she did, Faye finally got a look at the fine cord in her hands. It was two feet long, braided of tightly wound cables that Glynis had twisted from the finest of fibers—her own hair. The free ends spilled like silk over her hands.
During the hours and days when she had lain in this room, alone and in pain, she’d plucked her hair out, strand by strand. She’d gathered it into hanks and given them a tight twist, then braided those twisted hanks into a slender rope as thick as her thumb. And then she’d waited for an opportunity that her brutalized body would let her take.
Daniel went limp, but Glynis didn’t loosen her grip.
The door shook again, then it burst open.
Simultaneously, Magda and Faye roared, “RACHEL…
GO!!!
”
The child clambered out of her tiny prison and ran toward the door, straight into Joe’s loving arms.
It was too soon.
Too soon for the contractions clenching Faye’s middle. Too soon for her water to break. Too soon for the grinding pressure that weakened her knees and turned her stomach and brought tears down her face in streams. Too soon for terrifying amounts of blood to flow.
It was five weeks too soon, but Faye’s baby was coming now.
Through the haze of pain and fear, Faye heard the paramedics use words like “placental abruption” and “significant hemorrhage” and “life-threatening” and “emergency cesarean.” She heard them say, “Get back. All of you. She’s going on the ambulance. Now. Now!” And she heard someone, maybe Suzanne, ask Joe, “Are you Catholic? Should we call a priest?”
Part of her knew exactly what those words meant. A placental abruption meant that she could bleed to death. It meant that the baby could die or be forever damaged by lack of the oxygen stored in the blood that was being wasted on the floor beneath her.
Another part of her was thinking about leaving. That part was pulling away from her icy-cold body and floating up, away from the pain, away from the blood, away from Joe’s tears.
Away from Joe.
As much as she wanted to leave the pain and the blood, she couldn’t leave Joe. And she couldn’t give up on their baby.
She reached for the faith of her childhood, praying for her baby to live, even if she didn’t. The effort gave her some comfort, some feeling of God cradling her and keeping her warm.
But there were others with her. One of them was Allyce Dunkirk, who simply held her hand and wept. Allyce had labored over children and lost them, right here in this house. Her presence frightened Faye, but she gripped the spectral woman’s hand anyway.
She derived more comfort from the visitation of Father Domingo Sanz de la Fuente. She tried to tell him that she wasn’t a Roman Catholic, but he waved away her concern. Father Domingo had spent his life tending nonbelievers with the tenderest of mercy. He dabbed something cool and sweet-smelling on her forehead and simply lingered, supporting her with his presence.
Someone tangible and solid grasped her arm gently and dabbed on something sharp-smelling and acrid. He said, “This will hurt a second. We’re going to get your baby born. After that, we’re going to take good care of you both.” His faint Cuban accent made Faye think maybe Father Domingo had come for her in the flesh.
Her mind, always overactive, wanted to rest but couldn’t. She found herself remembering Father Domingo’s story, day by day and page by page. Its tragedy was overshadowed by the Spanish priest’s unwavering love for his people and for his dedication to God. That dedication had only wavered once.
Faye hoped God had forgiven him. She had.
Cold water closed over her head. She was alone with Allyce Dunkirk and Father Domingo. And God.