The Abduction of Kelsey (21 page)

“This morning?” Kelsey echoed. “You were here this morning?”

“Yeah.” Michael shook his head. “He told me I could come back this afternoon to talk to his wife. If I’d known you were here all along, oh my god…”

Kelsey brought her hands together and stared down at the offending band of gold still on her finger. Twisting it, she yanked it off and hurled it with all her might against the wall. She saw that Michael was staring at her and she started to laugh, a bubble of hysteria bursting from her lips.

“His wife,” she gasped, “his obedient, submissive wife!” She doubled over, laughing so hard she could barely catch her breath, the sound echoing like a howl in her ears. She wasn’t sure when the laughing segued into sobbing, but all at once the tears were streaming down her cheeks, and Michael had wrapped his arms around her and was holding her in a gentle but firm embrace.

“What did he do to you?” Michael murmured as he held her. “What did that bastard do to you?”

Eventually Kelsey quieted. She liked being held in this man’s arms. He was so different from James, and he smelled good, like wood smoke and peppermint. She felt safe for the first time in a hundred years, a hundred lifetimes.

Finally Michael let her go, settling her gently against the back of the sofa. “I’m going to call your parents, okay? Let them know I’ve found you. Then we should call the cops. Do you have any idea where Bennett went? Do you think he’s coming back?”

“Mexico,” Kelsey said. “We were supposed to go to Mexico this morning, but when he unlatched the punishment closet—”

“The punishment closet?” Michael repeated, his face darkening with anger. “We have to get this bastard, Kelsey. He won’t get away with what he’s done to you.”

Kelsey nodded her agreement. Then she saw the lockbox on the floor beside the sofa. “Oh,” she said, confused and then afraid. He wouldn’t have left the lockbox full of gold and cash if he weren’t planning to return. She realized she’d been hoping against hope that he was well and truly gone.

“What?” Michael said as he followed her gaze. He stood and moved around the sofa to see what she was looking at. “What’s this?”

The key was still in the lock. Michael crouched beside it and lifted the lid. “Whoa,” he breathed. “What the hell…? There’s a fortune in this thing, Kelsey.” He turned and stared at her with those penetrating blue eyes. “Where in the hell did he get all this? Did he rob a bank or something?”

Kelsey shook her head. “It’s his inheritance, he said. He showed it to me last night.”

Michael lifted something from the lockbox and held it out toward her. “Maybe this letter will shed some light. It’s addressed to you.”

Kelsey saw the envelope with her name written on the front in James’ angular hand. She turned away. “I don’t want to touch it. I don’t care what it says.”

“It could be important. How about I’ll read it to you? Would that be okay?”

Kelsey shrugged. She knew she was being irrational. She should hear whatever James had to say. And Michael should hear it too. Let someone else be a witness to his insanity. “Okay,” she said. “Read it.”

Michael slipped his finger under the loosely sealed flap of the envelope and smoothed the letter open on his lap.

“Dearest Kelsey,”
he read. “
By the time you read this, I will be gone. I had been planning to take you with me, my darling wife and light of my life, but I have come to understand that, while I love you with all my heart, you can never return that love.

“This is my fault. I stole what should have been freely given. I took what was never mine. Instead of earning your love and proving my worth, I crossed a line that should never be crossed. I can’t undo what has been done. I perverted what should have been a beautiful thing. I hid behind the teachings of bullies, telling myself it was for your own good, and that you would come to love me in time.

“I know you probably can’t understand this, but when I beat you”—
Michael’s voice faltered as he read these words. He cleared his throat and continued—“
it was to teach you how to be an obedient wife. When I withheld food and comfort, it was to train you to behave in the fashion befitting a proper submissive woman.”

Michael broke off, looking at Kelsey. “My god, the man is a raving lunatic. He’s a monster. You poor girl.” His voice cracked and Kelsey saw that tears were rolling down his cheeks. “Look, we don’t have to read this now.”

“No,” Kelsey said, wanting Michael to hear what James had written, needing to hear it herself. He was, she realized, making a confession and a kind of apology, in his own twisted, sick way. “Keep going.”

Michael took a breath, nodded and continued. “
I somehow managed to convince myself that you needed and even, on some level, wanted what I was doing to you. I suppressed my better nature, giving in to my baser instincts and lust without regard to your needs or desires.

“Something happened this morning that finally cut through my already rattled defenses and made me see that I’d lost the very woman I claimed to love. I’d turned you into something you are not, and nearly snuffed out your soul in the process.

“I only pray you can recover. I don’t ask for forgiveness, as I deserve none. I can promise you this. I will never darken your door again. I am going somewhere no one can follow, somewhere I can be at peace with what I have done.

“I love you. I’m sorry.

“James Matthew Bennett.”

A sudden, urgent beeping sound startled Kelsey. She realized it was coming from a small walkie-talkie type device on Michael’s belt. He stood and reached for it. “Police scanner,” he explained as he pulled the device from his belt. “The beep tells me it’s a local emergency.”

“It’s James,” Kelsey said, no idea how she knew, but certain she was right.

Michael depressed the button on the device, and they listened to garbled voices. “Late model Audi A4...crashed headlong into the ravine.” More unintelligible words and then, “Eyewitness says the car turned off and just drove right over the edge…Survivors unlikely…” Silence for several long seconds and then, “We’re arriving at the scene…Holy cow, the car just exploded! Get backup here right away.”

Kelsey stood and turned wordlessly to Michael. He held out his arms and she stepped into them. Leaning her cheek against his chest, she closed her eyes as he held her close.

“He finally let me go,” she whispered, tears streaming down her face. “I’m free.”

Michael Johansen thought he had seen it all in the nine years he’d been working, first as a cop and then as a private investigator specializing in missing persons. When Patrick and Katherine Rowan had enlisted his services and sent him up north to find their missing daughter, the local cops had been reasonably forthcoming with their files, though they hadn’t managed to turn up much. When he’d interviewed her coworkers, one conversation in particular had stood out for him about James’ apparently obsessive interest in Kelsey. Michael had learned to trust his gut, and his gut told him to follow that lead, in spite of the fact that James was supposedly off somewhere getting treatment for cancer.

His suspicions had been further stoked by Bennett’s agitated and even hostile behavior during the interview. The timing had been too neat between Kelsey’s disappearance and James’ abrupt departure from the bank. And he remained the last person seen with Kelsey the night of her disappearance. Even so, Michael had known the odds were good that, with so many months behind them, Kelsey was probably long dead and buried. Still he’d hoped at least to discover what had happened and give her parents some closure.

The shock of finding Kelsey as quickly as he had, half-starved and terrified, had blinded him at first to her courage and inner strength. During the first couple of days when she’d been interviewed endlessly by the cops from her hospital bed, he had tried to keep his distance, at least emotionally, though in truth, he’d barely left her side. She had stabilized quickly and been released within a few days to return with her parents to their Florida home.

Even on that first day in the hospital before her parents had swooped in, he could see she’d begun to rally, refusing to be cast as the victim. Michael had admired that in her, aware the wounds she’d suffered went deeper than just the welts and marks that monster had left on her body. Michael had further admired her compassion in the face of what the police ruled as James’ suicide. Even after what the man had put her through, she was sad for the way he’d ended his life.

Try as he might to resist it, Michael’s attraction to Kelsey had been immediate and fierce, though he’d kept that firmly to himself. He knew she faced a long uphill battle to full recovery, and he certainly didn’t intend to make things more complicated for her by coming on to her.

Yet once back in Florida, he couldn’t seem to get the lovely young woman out of his head. He nearly called her a dozen times, but held himself back. He did check in with her parents after the first week, and had been gratified to learn she was doing well, all things considered. He’d told himself to let it go. He’d done his job and that was that. He was a professional. He would forget about her in time. He would throw himself into his work, as he always did, and forget the way she had felt in his arms, or the trusting look in her lovely green eyes.

He almost managed it.

Until the day she called him, and the sound of her sultry voice sent a jolt of pure joy right down to his toes.

~*~

Kelsey watched the waves rolling toward her and then falling back, their white caplets bubbling over the sand as the waves retreated. The sun was warm, the breeze softly scented with salt and suntan oil. She leaned back on her elbows and stared up at the wide blue sky. Closing her eyes, she became that soaring white bird she had metamorphosed into during the worst of her captivity, when to remain in her human form was just too painful.

She still had nightmares, waking in a cold sweat, shivering and sobbing, but they came less often now, and she was better able to shake off the shackles of the lingering dreams more quickly. The bruises and welts had all long since healed, save for the scar left from the bullet graze.

She thought sometimes of how James had called the marks left from the beatings “badges of courage”, and how angrily she’d recoiled from that description at the time. Now, though, as she fingered the jagged scar left by the bullet, she wasn’t so quick to dismiss the characterization. She had been alone and defenseless against someone much bigger and stronger than herself, but she had managed to get that gun, and would have shot him, too, if she’d had the chance. She’d slashed him with a kitchen knife, and she’d fully intended to kill him when she got the gun the second time, even though she’d been shaking like a leaf. She’d nearly been beaten down, but in the end she’d come alive again, ready to fight, never giving up.

“You can only be truly brave when you’re afraid,” she’d remembered reading somewhere, and it was true. She’d been terrified, but she’d been courageous, too. Still, even the bravest soul can only hold out so long when deprived of food, kept in chains and treated with a terrifying blend of brutality and kindness that had nearly driven her mad.

She had been on the edge of losing her mind, slipping each day a little deeper into the role James had so relentlessly forced her into—what he had called an obedient and submissive “wife”. Under the guise of a stern but loving “husband”, he had given free rein to his darkest fantasies, using the power of his position to twist the concept of love into something sharp and cutting, something that ripped into her soul and made her heart, as well as her body, bleed.

No wonder she had taken wing when she could, soaring away from whatever atrocity he was committing at the moment. It was during those times when she was sailing over a silent, deep blue sea on strong white wings that her mind somehow healed itself, at least a little, at least enough to keep the essence of who she was still alive somewhere beneath the brutalized, frightened girl she had become.

And yet, for all the evil James had done, she found she no longer hated him. They say that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but in the end, James gave up that power. When he realized Michael was on the trail, he could have taken Kelsey and run, as he’d so carefully planned beforehand. But something, some lingering spark of humanity still burning inside him had flared long enough for him to commit one final, selfless act. He could have run, hiding forever in the shadows, always leaving Kelsey to wonder if someday, somehow, he would return to abduct her once again, this time taking her far away where no one could ever find her. Though his death had been tragic, knowing the nightmare was well and truly over let her sleep at night.

If Michael hadn’t arrived when he had, showing James that photo from a family beach vacation and hinting that he knew more than he actually had, would Kelsey even now be held prisoner in a small house in some Mexican village, her mind finally destroyed by the constant barrage of torture, deprivation and brainwashing? The thought that James might have impregnated her during the week he’d withheld the birth control still made her shudder. Yet it had been the threat of bringing innocent babes into the nightmare world he’d created that had shaken her out of her torpor and given her the courage to fight. Even now, it was terrifying to realize just how close she’d come to losing everything, most especially herself.

Though the day was warm, she felt suddenly cold, as if icy fingers were scraping along her spine. She shuddered and pulled her knees up to her body, wrapping her arms around them.

A strong but gentle hand stroked her arm. “Hey, you okay?”

She turned to Michael, surprised when he wiped away a tear from her cheek with his thumb. She hadn’t even realized she was crying.

During the first few months back in Florida with her parents, she would find herself sobbing uncontrollably at the drop of a hat, which had worried her parents to death, even when her therapist had assured them it was okay—it was just her mind and body’s way of coping with pent-up stress as she worked through the trauma. Over time the stormy sob sessions had ebbed, yet there were still mornings she would wake up with a face wet with tears, or find herself quietly crying while reading a book or, as now, staring out at the ocean.