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In the end it was Sue herself who closed the deal for Sean, just today. Upon hearing the news Sean dropped by the office, ecstatic, with two freshly steamed lobsters and a gift-wrapped case of liquor that he insisted Sue take home with her. Sue was happy to accept the lobsters, but she hasn’t had anything stronger than club soda in five years. She hadn’t even bothered unwrapping it to see what it was. And right now, as the traffic shifts forward and the bottles in the back of the Expedition clink softly together, she wonders what on earth she’s going to do with an entire case of hard liquor. It’s too late to give it out for Christmas. Does Goodwill accept alcohol?

She reaches over and pulls out her cell phone from her coat pocket. It would be easier to pick up the car phone mounted in the Expedition, just twelve inches away from the steering wheel. But she’s so in the habit of using her cell—sometimes it feels grafted between her shoulder and her jaw—that she’ll often catch herself using it even when she’s home sitting right in front of the land line.

Sue hits the programmed number for the house and waits, but there’s no answer. No messages from Marilyn on her voicemail or the machine. No text messages except Brad at work reminding her about the bank meeting with Sean tomorrow morning to close on his bar. She dials the number in the Jeep and after three rings Marilyn picks up with a disorganized-sounding “hello.”

“Hey,” Sue says, “it’s me.”

“Oh, hey, hi.”

Sue checks the clock again even though she just did it twenty seconds earlier. It’s a habit with her. Time is a rival. “You headed out for dinner?”

“Actually just getting back,” Marilyn says, and in the background Sue can hear Veda doing a running commentary in the blithe, hyper-inflective nonsense of toddler argot. “Her Creative Movements class ran a little late and we ended up grabbing an early dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. Should be home in twenty minutes or so.”

“So you already ate?”

“Yeah.”

Sue looks at the Legal Seafood box on the floor next to her, the one that Sean had produced with such pleasure that she couldn’t help getting caught up in his excitement. “Too bad for you. Somebody gave me a couple of lobsters.” It’s the sort of remark that invites questions—somebody gave you
lobsters
?—but she only hears Marilyn grunt on the other end, uncharacteristically quiet, distracted. A red light goes on in Sue’s mind. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah,” Marilyn says, “this loser in a van is just riding my tail. Sorry.”

“I’ll let you go.”

“We’ll see you back at the house,” Marilyn says, and clicks off. Sue drops the phone on top of her coat, folded on the passenger seat, and concentrates on her driving. It isn’t snowing, not yet, but it still takes her the better part of an hour to get back to Concord and by the time she pulls up to the house she’s hungry and frustrated enough that she forgets the lobsters and the liquor in the car.

Inside, it takes her a moment before she realizes that Marilyn and Veda aren’t home yet. She kicks off her shoes and calls the Jeep’s phone again but this time nobody answers.

Odd, she thinks, heading into the kitchen. Not alarming, necessarily, but definitely out of character for Marilyn, who wouldn’t normally deviate from the plan without letting Sue know. Marilyn’s been Sue’s nanny for over a year now and they work well together because they think alike. Veda loves Marilyn, and that’s terrific, that’s a real plus. But at the end of the day what matters is that Marilyn and Sue share the same peculiarities, the same worries, the same little neuroses about raising a child in a world where handguns cost less than a pair of sneakers and nobody washes their hands. When the agency first sent her over for an interview, Sue took Marilyn out to lunch and watched her use her hip to bump open the ladies’ room door so that she could keep her hands clean. Sue made her an offer before their salads arrived.

The phone rings as she’s pouring herself a cranberry juice and tonic with a wedge of lime.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice, one she doesn’t know. “Susan Young?”

“Speaking,” she says, already thinking:
telemarketer.
She hasn’t been Susan to anybody but distant relatives since eighth grade. There’s still half a chicken Caesar in the fridge from last night at the Capital Grille and she opens the Styrofoam box with the phone tucked under her jaw, picking off slightly soggy croutons and cherry tomatoes.

“Is this Susan?” the man asks again with irritating slowness.

“Yes, this is she. Who’s calling?”

“You have a very lovely little girl, Susan.”

And Sue freezes, feeling the tiles of the kitchen floor vanish beneath her feet. “Who is this?”

“She’s beautiful. Gorgeous green eyes, precious blond hair, those little dimples on the backs of her hands when she uncurls her fingers. And that smile, Susan. She certainly favors you.” The voice pauses. “Susan? Are you there?”

7:22P.M.

Sue doesn’t say anything. Can’t, really. Standing in the middle of her kitchen, gazing out the window where her three acres of dark woods slope away underneath the moonlight, she’s hearing things in the man’s voice, a barely suppressed note of hilarity underneath what she first thought was a toneless growl. She can hear him breathe between phrases, as if it’s difficult for him to get whole sentences out without inhaling. There are no other sounds in the background.

Somehow she has the presence of mind to think that when things like this happen in the movies or on TV the person’s first response is to accuse the caller of playing some kind of joke, or to get angry and accuse them of lying. But somehow she knows that this is not a joke and the man on the phone isn’t lying to her. And anger is a long, long way from what she’s feeling right now.

“I haven’t lost you, have I, Susan?”

No,
she tries to say but no noise comes out. There is still the sense of not touching anything, not even the clothes she’s wearing. In fact she is floating, suspended in a gel of utter disbelief, not even horrified yet, although the horror is certainly out there and she can feel it corroding its way inward. “No,” she says again, louder. “Who is this?”

“We’ll get there,” the man says. “We’ve got all night. And after all this is December twenty-first. The longest night of the year.”

She has absolutely no idea how to respond to that observation. “Is she there?” she asks. “Is my daughter there with you?”

“Of course she is, Susan. You don’t think I’d leave a little one-year-old unattended, do you?”

“Where’s Marilyn?”

The man hesitates like he has to think about it. “Oh,” he says, “she’s here, too. We’re all here, Susan.”

“Let me talk to my daughter. Please.”

“I’ll put her on soon, I promise. Before that we need to establish a few ground rules. You’ve got a long way to go in the next twelve hours. It will make everything much easier and that way there won’t be any misunderstandings between us later on.” The man is speaking a bit quicker now, out of excitement, she senses. “First, it’s important that you don’t call the police. Not that I don’t trust you, Susan, but you should know that I have tapped your phone and I’m scanning your cell, so if you make any calls to anyone, I’ll know. Now I’m going to hang up and wait, and if you’ve followed rule number one, then in ten minutes I’ll call back and we’ll go from there. Are you with me so far?”

“Wait—”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he says, and hangs up on her, gone, just like that. She stands there with the phone buzzing in her hand and then it leaps upon her, the fullness of it, with all its weight. She has never been one to absorb things gradually. When the unexpected happens she would always rather grapple with it immediately and to hell with denial, anger, and all those other stages of acceptance.

The room begins to tilt and she feels her knees buckle as she sinks to the floor still clutching the phone, realizing she’s not breathing yet unable to will herself to inhale. From somewhere deep in her chest she hears the low, slow whine of her lungs pleading for air. Instead she begins slowly and deliberately to bring order to the available facts. She forces herself to think rationally. She hears Marilyn’s voice on the phone from an hour earlier:

This loser in a van is just riding my tail.

The realization kicks the door wide open to a blizzard of images. The man who was following her forcing the Jeep off the road, dragging Marilyn from behind the wheel, putting a gun to her head, and forcing her out of the car. Climbing into the Jeep with Veda still strapped into her car seat, Veda facing backward, her round, mostly bald head cocked in confusion and alarm at her nanny’s screams and cries for help, the faceless one putting the vehicle in gear and driving off into the night. The man and Sue’s daughter somewhere out on the freeway now, somewhere in the black expanse of a New England winter—

The phone rings again and Sue almost screams.

7:28P.M.

She drops it, picks it up again, and hits the talk button: “Yes.”

“Hey, Susie-Q. You sound stressed, babe, you okay?” It’s a different man’s voice, smoother, familiar, and through her panic Sue realizes that it’s Brad from the office. “Listen, just a couple quick questions about the bank meeting tomorrow morning—”

“I can’t talk right now.”

“What’s wrong?” He’s dropped the hipster affectation for a more genuine concern, but Sue’s already hanging up on him, still crouched down so that her kitchen and dining room sprawl high above her. She assumes the world looks like this to Veda all the time. The ceiling just goes up and up. She has another vivid flash of her daughter in her car seat, scared and crying inconsolably, and feels her jaw yawn wide to let out an aching scream that comes out more like a sob.

Through all the crazy shifts she’s worked at Commonwealth Emergency Response and the death and bloodshed she’s witnessed in those early days, only once has Sue experienced anything of this intensity, a hot summer afternoon that she scarcely remembers except on the most subconscious level. Yet in some terribly practical way that experience has inoculated her against certain dangerous extremes—the very real possibility of losing herself to hysteria, for example. Even now she has found that she does not get hysterical, and in a moment her breathing has restored itself to a shallow but steady rhythm.

The phone rings again. She goes flopping across the floor as if struck by a cattle prod but this time she does not scream.

“Hello.”

“Who was that, Susan?” the voice asks.

“Brad. He works at my office. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“I know,” the voice says. “I told you I would be listening. You were a very good girl. It was an unexpected test, but you passed with flying colors. I believe you’re ready to move to the next level. What do you think?”

“Please, just let me talk to her.” It is so deadly quiet on his end, with only his voice relayed to her through the shallow acoustics of a wireless line, the closest thing she can imagine to hearing voices in your own head. “Just for a second. May I, please?”

“Absolutely,” he says. “Didn’t I promise I’d let you do that? I always keep my promises, Susan.” And there’s a rustle of fabric or skin against the mouthpiece, then a silence, followed by soft, intent breathing that she recognizes instantly as her daughter’s.

And just like that Sue Young’s hard-won composure disappears.

She just melts.

“Veda, honey?” she says. “It’s Mommy, baby. Sweetie, can you hear me?
Veda…?
” She feels the tears swell up behind her eyes, pressure mounting in her chest like a balloon expanding between her lungs and ribs, filling her with all the horror and fear in the world until it’s leaking out her eyes and nose and mouth. “Veda, it’s going to be all right, honey, Mommy promises, everything’s going to be okay, okay?”

Veda makes one of her sounds, a repeating two-syllable noise coiled in puzzlement—dukka-
dukka
?—and that does it. The fear and grief just take over. Sue breaks down. Tears stream down and the screams start backing up in her throat and somehow she manages to hold her breath for one more second because she wants to hear if Veda says anything else. But there is nothing else coming, just another rustling sound and the voice coming back on, sounding deeply pleased with itself.

“She’s very good with strangers,” he observes, almost mildly.

Sue forces herself to stop crying, bites her lip, balls her left hand into a fist, and mashes it to her mouth. “Anything,” she says finally. She can taste blood mixed with tears and her lip aches faintly from biting it. Her chest, her face, her throat all ache. “Anything you want. Just please, don’t hurt her.”

“I told you, we’ll get to that. You passed the first test, Susan, but I just need to be absolutely sure that I can trust you not to call the police.”

“I won’t. I swear.”

No answer.

“You want money,” she says. “I can give you however much you want. Just name your price.”

“
You’re not listening to me.”
Abruptly the voice has taken a nasty turn. “I’m assuming that you’re smart, Susan, but right now you’re losing IQ points by the second. Now, if you want to see your daughter alive, then shut up and listen.” He doesn’t wait for any acknowledgment beyond her silence. “All right. Are you ready to listen and do what I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’re going to go outside and get in your car. I’m giving you ten seconds to get out there. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Go.”

He hangs up and she drops the cordless, pivots, and bolts out of the kitchen and down the hall in her stocking feet, jumping out the front door and down the driveway. The darkness and cold against her skin don’t even register. The door latch on the Expedition catches the first time and she jerks it again, jumps behind the wheel, and grabs the car phone, which is already ringing. Like the radio it is designed to carry a residual charge allowing for its use even when the motor isn’t running.

“I’m here,” she says.

“Start the engine.”

Sue gropes instinctively for the ignition and finds nothing but air. The keys aren’t there. Of course they aren’t. She brought them into the house with her and dropped them on the counter right before taking off her shoes. She feels a cramp of dread and improbable embarrassment. “I didn’t bring my keys.”