Trace of Doubt (14 page)

Chapter 25

I
turned off the television, just not wanting to hear any more. Had he left the TV on to unnerve me? Or, worse, had Dad been watching television, innocently unaware he was being stalked. In my mind I pictured an act of violence occurring right here, my father being murdered. I shook my head to chase the image from my brain.

“Let’s check upstairs.”

David nodded, and we crept to the staircase.

“Let me go up first,” he whispered.

“I have the gun.”

“Look…just let me go first. If he gets me, you can shoot him.” David cut me off at the stairwell and started up ahead of me. My heart pounded so loudly in my own ears, I felt like David could hear it. Swallowing hard, I tried to calm myself, but it wasn’t working.

We went to my old bedroom. Nothing seemed amiss. Dad had never taken down my floral pink wallpaper, and on the shelves sat dolls and the usual artifacts of a teenage girl, yearbooks and photos and souvenirs of proms and vacations. I walked to the closet.

“On three,” I whispered, and opened it just like I had seen cops do on television shows forever. “One, two, three,” I opened it and aimed my gun into the blackness of the closet.

Nothing. My closet was full of my father’s off-season clothes and a couple of boxes of my old stuffed animals, labeled. I don’t know why we had never thrown them out. Guess I didn’t have the heart to toss my old teddy bears and stuffed dogs and carnival prizes into the trash.

David and I moved along to Mikey’s old room, which Dad now used mainly to store junk. Dad’s unused exercise bike was gathering dust. A tread-mill stood in one corner. This, my father called his “gym.” I smiled to myself. Yeah. I’m sure Dad hadn’t been in that room in a year.

In the master bedroom, everything was neat as a pin, except Andrew had taken a picture of me from a frame, and placed it on the pillow next to another souvenir—a long lock of black hair.

“What, does he scalp people?” David asked.

“I don’t know.” I moved closer to the bed. “The blood on this hair is fresh. This is from his sister.”

I felt frantic. Where was my father?

“Shit, David. We don’t have time to wait for the police. We’ve got to find him.”

I tried to think. I looked out into the yard.

“Let’s go to the treehouse,” I said, going over to the window. I wondered if he was watching us. Watching and waiting.

David and I ran downstairs and out into the yard. My cell phone rang. I looked at it to see if it was my father’s cell phone dialing, but it was Lewis.

“Billie, Ben says to stay away from your dad’s place. He’s on his way. SWAT is coming.”

“Too late, we’re here and Dad’s not.”

“Billie, I’m telling you to get out. Go wait out front of the house for the police to arrive. Please. Honey, I’ve never been so worried about a human being my whole life.”

“I just have one more place to check, Lewis.”

I snapped my phone closed before I could hear him rebuke me. David was three or four steps ahead of me. “David! I’ll check the treehouse, you go check the perimeter of the woods, but don’t go too far in. If we don’t spot him, we’ll wait. Ben Sato is coming with the cops.” I hoped, at this point, for vans of SWAT teams and helicopters.

David veered over to the left to go searching. I knew Andrew said to come alone, but the situation was out of control. We didn’t have flashlights, and there wasn’t much of a moon. I scrambled to the treehouse and started climbing up it. Mikey and I had hammered in short pieces of two-by-fours to make steps for a ladder, and then a hole in the floor of the treehouse had a trapdoor over it. Our uncle Tony, the one who owns Quinn’s, helped us build it one summer, and we spent nearly every night sleeping in it. We created our own little world that wasn’t marred by her murder. We hid from the pain in that treehouse, which is why the thought of my father selling our old house broke my heart.

I pushed on the trap door. Something was partially blocking it. I maneuvered my shoulder and pushed as hard as I could, and whatever it was moved. I positioned my gun and then popped the trap door up. I could see my dad lying on the floor.

“Dad?” I scrambled up into the treehouse. No one else was there. My father was bleeding from a stab wound in his shoulder area. I rushed to his side and put down my gun, and instead pushed on the wound to try to stop the blood flow.

I leaned my head out of the treehouse. “David!” I screamed into the night. “I need help!” I squinted toward the woods, but couldn’t see him.

I sat on the floor by my dad. I knew this would all be over soon. I just prayed Ben would get here fast.

I thought of C.C. telling me no matter how long it had been since Lewis and I last talked to God that he was there for us, waiting with open arms.

Dear God…please, please, please let my daddy be okay. Protect us all. Take me. Take me, not him.

I heard David climbing up the treehouse ladder, and his head appeared in trapdoor hole. Then I realized it wasn’t David. Or Ben.

I was face-to-face with Andrew Colton.

My mother’s killer.

And he looked absolutely, sickeningly delighted to see me.

Chapter 26

I
kicked him in the face, and he grunted. I kicked again, then tried to shut the trap door and slam his hands in it. But he was strong. Really strong.

He shoved upward on the trap door, and soon his shoulder and head and arms were in the treehouse, with just his waist and legs down.

“Is that any way to say hello, Billie?”

I dove for my gun, but so did he. Using his palm, he spun the gun away from me to the corner of the treehouse.

I felt trapped. I
was
trapped. I couldn’t figure out how I was going to protect my father and fight off Andrew. I knew if I stood, I’d have a height advantage, at least until he got all the way up on the platform.

I got up on my feet, but then realized that was a mistake. I was the adult Billie, not the child Billie—the ceiling of the treehouse was too low to let me stand upright. The treehouse made me have to duck my head. I felt off-kilter, which I guessed was maybe his idea in the first place, a claustrophobic, off-kilter sense of suffocation up there in the darkness. I tried to deliver a roundhouse kick to his neck, but he was quick and grabbed my foot, causing me to fall to the floor on my ass, hard. He twisted my leg, and I was on my side. Old leaves and dampness pressed against my face. I tried to kick my leg free.

Andrew, meanwhile, finished climbing in. I started crawling toward the gun, but he delivered a solid kick to my stomach. I vomited, more like a dry heave, and then sucked for air. Using his foot, he half kicked, half pushed me until my head was down dangling from the square opening in the floor of the treehouse. One more hard shove and I was going face first down the oak tree.

I frantically clawed and used my arms to try to keep from being pushed. Eventually, I was able to maneuver myself so that my legs and butt dangled down, but my arms and head were inside the treehouse. Better to fall feet-first instead of straight down onto my head.

Then he got closer to me. I spat at him and he punched my face, causing me to let go, and I fell to the ground with a heavy thud. Pain radiated throughout my body. I looked down at my leg. It wasn’t broken, I didn’t think. Or maybe it was. I felt dizzy and rolled onto my side, straining my ears for sirens.

“David!” I screamed. I found I couldn’t get onto my hands and knees. My leg
was
broken. It had to be because it wasn’t listening to what my brain was trying to tell it. “David!” I shrieked louder. I was frantic. Where was he?

“David!”

I was aware that Andrew was calmly climbing down the ladder. “David can’t hear you.” Andrew stood over me. “He’s dead.”

“No!” I heard myself screaming from someplace very dark and very terrifying. I saw Andrew’s hand coming down to my face. He had a cloth, which he pressed over my nose and mouth. And then…only blackness.

Chapter 27

I
had no idea how long I was out. None. It could have been an hour. It could have been a week.

When I started to wake up, my head hurt. My leg hurt more. Pain just seared through me and made me almost want to go back to unconsciousness, but I fought to wake up.

My mouth was cottony. It had been that kind of dead unconsciousness where you don’t wake refreshed but instead with a panicked, fighting feeling, struggling to clear your mind.

I was in a dark room. Windowless. Maybe a basement. I tried to think back, and only flashes came to me.

Dad lying there bleeding.

The fight with Andrew.

My broken leg.

David.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming, but a sob desperately wanted to escape from my chest.

We should have stayed together. I was so desperate to find my father that I may have caused the death of both of them.

I tried to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I was lying on a queen-size bed, and my hands were duct-taped together. I struggled a bit. There was a little give there. I moved my head and saw stars—I guessed I maybe had a concussion from the fall from the treehouse. Swallowing hard to keep from throwing up, I moved more carefully, more gingerly.

There was nothing I could see that might help me cut the tape. The room had a dresser but no mirror. The bed didn’t have a headboard. Nothing else was in the room.

My heart pounded. Panic was the enemy at this point. I had to stay clear-headed. I was desperate for a glass of water.

Above me, I heard someone walking upstairs. I
was
in a basement of some sort. I heard footsteps on a staircase. I tried to steel myself for whatever was coming next.

The door swung open and Andrew stood, illuminated by a bare bulb hanging from a socket in the ceiling.

“Sleep well, my lovely?”

“You didn’t have to kill David. You didn’t have to hurt my father.”

“Sweetheart,” he shushed me. “No lovers’ quarrels. Please, the children will hear us. I merely eliminated the obstacles to our happiness. In time, you’ll see I did the right thing.”

This guy was stark, raving mad. But at the mention of the children—the ones from the Amber Alert, no doubt—I knew whatever terror I felt, I needed to keep subdued for their sake. I prayed they were still alive and not dead and posed in some sort of fantasy.

“Where are we?”

“Tsk, tsk, darling. I can’t tell you that.”

I tried to reason that if he dragged me to the van, with Ben and the police on their way, he couldn’t have driven far. They had a partial plate on, the news and people would be on the lookout. He had to have a place to stash us close. I prayed the police were canvasing the neighborhood—whatever neighborhood that was.

Because the media released the partial plate, he would have had to stash the van. Maybe he parked it in a garage and took us into a house. If the police were canvasing, they were surely looking in garages. Please, I thought to myself, please be looking. Don’t give up.

Lewis. Ben. C.C. Joe. There was no way they would let me die here. Ben was the best intuitive cop alive. Tommy Two Trees had told Lewis that. With Lewis’s scientific mind, C.C.’s spiritual mind and Ben’s warrior nature, I prayed they would find me. Me and the children.

I was dying of thirst, and now I noticed he had a glass of water in his left hand. At least it looked like water.

“Thirsty?” He grinned at me.

I was desperately thirsty. I was so thirsty, I couldn’t recall ever feeling this way before, not even on the hottest summer day. But I didn’t trust him. He could be poisoning me.

“No.”

He took a big swig of water from the glass.

“There. I’m not going to kill you this way. Not after I went to all this trouble to get you, darling.”

He held the glass to my lips. “Sip.”

Despite my utter revulsion at sharing a glass with the man who killed my mother and lover, my fiancé, I sipped. I couldn’t fight him if I was dehydrated, if I didn’t have a clear mind.

He took his hand and stroked my face. I wanted to bite his hand. He put the glass down and went over to the dresser. He returned with a pair of scissors.

Shit,
I thought. Taking my hair, he cut off a lock.

“For my scrapbook,” he told me.

Then he stood, and taking the scissors with him, and the lock of hair, he left the room.

I desperately, with a primal fear, wanted to call out to him, to beg for my life. But I also knew that’s what he wanted. To play God. And I wasn’t going to let him.

A part of me even wondered if I did want to live.

David.

In the darkness and dampness of the basement room, all I could feel was grief.

I was Achlys.

Grief was my prison.

And then, despite my fear, the drugs betrayed me, and I fell back to sleep.

When I woke again, I was more clear-headed. I guessed more of the drugs had worn off. I felt two things: a crushing sense of grief and intense pain.

Lifting my head, I tried to glimpse my leg. I was wearing jeans. My legs weren’t tied, but if I moved my leg at all, I felt excruciating pain tear up and down my nerves from my foot to my hip.

I lay there. Lewis’s prophetic words came back to haunt me. Cat and mouse. And now I was in the mousetrap.

Think, Billie,
I told myself. Overpowering him would be impossible. I had seen what he was capable of when he scaled the Little League fence and when he fought me in the treehouse.

There was no time to think, though, because Andrew came into the room. This time he turned on a light and a dim bulb in the ceiling came on. I was able to see my bed was a Salvation Army-type cast-off, stained and disgusting. I saw dark-brown stains that looked like old blood. I knew if we tested it, there would be a wealth of evidence there. I consoled myself that when Ben and Lewis found me, even if I was dead, they could nail this bastard. I wanted a needle in his arm.

“Billie, if you’re a good girl, and you don’t try to run away, I have some dinner waiting for you. The children want to see their mommy. I promised them a new mommy, you know.”

I felt queasy with the thought of how much terror these children had to be feeling. It was then I made myself a promise. I would do whatever it took to stay alive. No matter how much pain, no matter how much grief, these children were going to get out of here alive if I had a breath of life in me myself.

“I’ll be good,” I said, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to run away anyway on my broken leg. I was blinking rapidly to get used to the light, which shone rather directly into my eyes, and now I could see Andrew clearly.

He looked just like Mikey. He had black hair and blue eyes, pale skin. He was dressed very nicely, actually, in dark pants and a black T-shirt. His hair was cut neatly. He didn’t look anything like a dangerous man. Like a killer. He was like Ted Bundy, like the serial killers that walk amongst us, undetected.

There was one big difference, though, compared to Mikey. My brother’s eyes danced. It was what drove women wild. He always looked like he knew a secret inside joke, as if at any moment he was going to burst into laughter. He had charisma. Charm. But Andrew’s eyes were as flat and glasslike as a doll’s.

They were the eyes of a man without a soul.

“I’m so pleased to hear you’ll be good, Billie. I have clothes for you to change into. This gown should fit you.” He held up a black peignoir set. A nightgown. “And I have a beautiful necklace for you.” He held up pearls. “And if you’re very good, I will even give you some pain medication for your leg. It’s definitely broken. That’s going to be tough.”

“I’ll manage,” I said flatly.

“Good. I’ll leave you to change.” He put the nightgown and the pearls on the bed with a hair-brush and red lipstick. Then he took the same scissors he had used to cut my hair and he cut the duct tape binding my hands. They felt numb, and I tried to rub them to bring the circulation back.

“Make yourself beautiful for Daddy.”

With that, he turned and walked away, shutting the door, and by the sound of it, locking it behind him.

I gingerly tried to sit up. My hands felt like they’d been stung by a hive of bees. Moving sent agonizing pain through my hip and leg. I pulled off my shirt and ever so slowly undid my jeans. Lying back down, I slid out of them as best I could, pulling them down to my thighs, then sitting up again and sliding them down to the floor.

Now I got a look at my leg. It made me feel sick to my stomach. It was mottled and red, and I assumed I was in danger of phlebitis or a blood clot.

I had no time to worry about my leg. I needed to think, think, think. My brain had always been my weapon. I needed to use it.

Pulling the nightgown on over my head, I found it fit me perfectly. I lifted the pearls. They looked like my mother’s. Two simple strands. I put them around my neck and then pulled a brush through my hair. My head hurt, so I did it as gently as possible, not tugging.

I lifted the lipstick and looked at the bottom of the tube. It was an old-fashioned-looking case. I squinted to read the shade. This had to be from twenty years ago. I uncapped it and smelled it. The scent was heavy, perfumed, waxy. I touched the lipstick. The texture was nothing like lipsticks available now.

Andrew was having me apply lipstick belonging to his dead mother.

So, feeling as if I was already a certain corpse, I pressed the lipstick to my lips and prayed in my mind for Ben to feel me, his Jungian other half.

Come find me.