Finding Claire Fletcher (14 page)

“I wish I could.” She was definitely crying now, and the sound of it made Connor sick to his stomach.

“Claire,” he said softly. “Tell me what to do.”

“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t come after me. I’ve already put you in danger. Just protect yourself.”

He waited for the click and dial tone, but she stayed on for another moment. “Connor?”

“Yeah.”

“I—” she stopped. He waited. He could hear her gulping air. “I’m sorry,” she said, hanging up.

I hung up the payphone and wiped the tears from my eyes without turning away from the narrow booth. My body trembled. I couldn’t control it. I gripped the grimy edges of the small shelf below the phone. Tears streamed down my face. Fear tickled my throat and the backs of my knees. The shivering and the tears came unbidden. I tried to breathe, but all that came out were strangled sobs. It was as if I was no longer in my body. I felt the emotion physically taking over, but my mind no longer had control. I hadn’t felt like that for many years.

My nose ran, and I fumbled in my pants pocket for a tissue. Of course I could not find one. I never carried anything on me. I settled for my shirtsleeve. I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated as hard as possible on my breathing. I listened to the cars pass by on the street, focusing on the sound. Air swishing, tires moving over the asphalt. If I did not get control soon, the world would start to spin, and I would pass out. I couldn’t draw attention to myself, and I couldn’t be late getting back to the trailer.

“Get a grip,” I muttered to myself.

Let me bring you in.

For a split second, I had thought that if anyone could bring me in, it would be Connor, and that was what made me cry. As if it was that simple. No one could rescue me, and if Connor tried, he would be sorry in more ways than one.

I wiped my eyes a final time and walked unsteadily back to the truck. I made it back to the trailer moments before he pulled up to the house across the road, but I felt Tiffany’s watchful eyes on me as I hurried inside.

When I visited her the other day, it seemed as though she really didn’t know anything. I had spent the last couple of days trying to convince myself of that, but maybe she did know that I had taken one of my ill-fated trips home, and she was just waiting to tell him—waiting until she had something to gain by telling him or until his attention waned.

I didn’t bother with the lights. I moved into my tiny bedroom and changed into my pajamas, which consisted of a pair of sweatpants and an old, oversized tee shirt I bought at a thrift store. I swiped a sweater from my closet and pulled it around me. The door of the house across the way slammed shut, but no rattle on my own door followed. I had only made Tiffany suspicious with my visit, although I sensed that she was hiding something.

In the last seven years, I had waged many small battles with her in this fashion. She had increased the torture of my small life exponentially from the day she arrived, making my days more difficult in new and unexpected ways, although before she arrived it was no picnic.

I climbed into bed and closed my eyes. My imagination conjured the heady scent of Connor and the smooth balm of his skin heating my own. The words seemed to come from another part of the trailer rather than from my memory. “Tell me what to do, Claire.”

I had tried to tell him what to do, even though it scuffed and scraped a part of me that still yearned for sweetness. I hoped he would stay away. He had to. I couldn’t bear to think of what would happen to Connor if he didn’t let me go forever.

I had witnessed my captor’s revenge for my sins firsthand.

One day after he had left me cuffed in the living room, I spied a newspaper on the floor by the couch. It took much wiggling and squirming, but eventually I pulled it toward me with my feet, losing half of it in a trail of pages. I looked at the date on the paper, and my world tipped to the side.

He’d had me for a year and a half.

I was sixteen, almost seventeen. I had been missing for a year and a half.

I cried then. Great wracking, sucking, gulping sobs that I had held in up to that point. I let something go inside me that I had been holding onto for all those months. It hurt like giving birth. Great floes of denial floated and idled out of my reach, solid masses I had been clinging to, sleeping upon, pressing my face into.

It was real. It was all real. This wasn’t a temporary state of affairs. It wasn’t a nightmare I would wake up from. It was really happening and there would never be a SWAT team on the other side of the door. Even left to my own devices I had been unable to break free. This was actually my life, all of it, and it was just going on, working scrupulously through the days, indifferent to my pain and my hope.

That day, without rushing, without even breaking a sweat, I carefully worked my hand loose from the cuffs once more. My thumb popped more easily out of joint this time. I gritted my teeth and reset it with a gasp.

I walked to the door, unlocked it, stepped outside and walked toward the trees. At a slow, steady pace I picked my way carefully through ferns, thorny branches, fallen tree trunks and rocks. I walked and walked.

Finally I came to a stretch of road lined with trees on both sides. My mind acknowledged the fact that I was actually free. All I had to do was flag down the next car that came down the road in either direction, and I could go home. But my body continued along the shoulder of the road without notice. No rushing in my ears, no pounding in my chest, no short breaths coming so quickly atop one another that my throat whistled. I walked, my ears pricked for the sound of a car.

When I finally heard one approaching behind me, I did not even turn. The car pulled up in front of me onto the shoulder of the road. When he emerged from it in a huff and flurry, I was not even surprised. I didn’t run, did not even look at him. I kept walking past him, past the car. He grabbed my arm, but I wiggled it loose and continued my balanced pace. Again he took my arm and pulled me, but I bent my body forward, moving with my hips, gaining fewer steps but gaining nevertheless. When he plucked my entire body off the road and carried me back to the car, my legs kept working calmly, slowly, still walking toward home.

We reached the car, and he clutched the back of my head. The door frame rushed toward my face as it had the day he snatched me, and I thought dryly,
one for old times’ sake.

Acceptance came later that night. I don’t think he ever really wore me down. No, he broke me with one swift and irrevocable act. All those months of pain, torture and deprivation were almost for nothing. I was not tethered to him by any of those things or even the length of time he had kept me prisoner. It was his retribution, his punishment for my walking escape that finally broke me.

Both my hands were cuffed to the living room radiator. I sat cross-legged, waiting for his return, for the beating that would inevitably follow. I felt numb, indifferent. I was ready for the blows, the slaps, kicks, and punches. Ready for them in the same way I would be ready to take a trip in a car or sit down to dinner.

Without a word he had brought me back, bound me and left immediately. The only evidence of his anger was the gash above my left eyebrow where my head had met the car door frame hours earlier.

I had made my ill-fated walking attempt in daylight, and when he came back, it was night. Before the door opened, I heard scuffles, grunts and gasps. Before I saw him, a body landed with a crack and a thud on the floor in front of me.

She had blonde hair. Her hands and feet were tied. There was something stuffed deep into her mouth and taped there, although one tantalizing edge of the duct tape peeled away from her skin. She was thin and slightly older than me. She squirmed, her body jerking up and down like an inchworm on speed.

My whole body woke up. Suddenly jolted into reality, I could feel every inch of my body. My vision filled with the sight of her. I looked around as if seeing the place for the first time. All the colors and shadows became sharp and fast like a slap to the face. My voice rose out of me, strong and high. He stood above the two of us, looking down his nose with the smile of a predator about to tear into a very tasty meal.

I got up on my knees. I tried to reach her but could not. “What are you doing?” I said. “Oh my God, what are you doing?”

She was there on the floor, just inches out of my reach and she would not stop seizing. Her face was turned away from me.

“What are you doing?” I repeated.

He pulled her across the room by the hair, and she squealed in pain, her legs pushing furiously to keep up with him, to keep her scalp from being torn off.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this, Lynn,” he said, his tone as quiet as ever. “But you’re impervious to all of my efforts to help you get comfortable here. I’m afraid I have to teach you a lesson.”

He hefted her up and slung her over the arm of the couch. Her legs dangled on the floor, and her upper body curved over the arm. She turned her head and saw me. She had brown eyes. Big brown eyes with luxuriant lashes. They were so wide it looked as if someone were literally squeezing them out of her head. I pulled and pulled against the cuffs. My body drew toward her like a magnet. She screamed as much as the gag would allow her. She spoke to me with her eyes that said
help me, oh God, please help me
.

My eyes on him, I stretched toward her. “No,” I said. “I don’t need a lesson. I don’t need a lesson. Please. Let her go. Leave her alone. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll never leave again. I’ll be good. Please.”

Her eyes filled with a mixture of horror and relief. I tried with my own to tell her that I meant every word. I would do anything to get him to let her go.

He shook his head sadly, sighing. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that, Lynn.”

“No
,” I screamed. My body squirmed futilely against the cuffs. “I swear to you. Please. I will do anything you say, anything you want. I’ll do it, I’ll do it. Just let her go. Don’t hurt her. Please.”

I used his language. “I’ll be a good girl. I’ll be such a good girl, and we can forget all about before. I’ll be so good you’ll forget I was ever bad. Please. Just let her go.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know you will, but letting her go will not help us. I have to teach you a lesson, Lynn. I have to prove my love for you because it’s obvious you don’t believe how much I love you.”

“No,” I said. “I do believe you. I believe you. You don’t have to do this. I don’t need a lesson. I get it now. I get it, okay? Just let her go.”

The girl blinked her eyes rapidly. Tears dripped from her face, and a thin strand of snot hung from her nose. Her face twisted, and I could smell both of our sweat and fear commingling, filling up the air between us.

“This isn’t about her,” I pleaded. “She has nothing to do with—us. Please. Oh, please.”

His lips pressed into a thin line, and he took off his belt. I did not want to watch. I thought he would rape her, and I did not want to see it. I did not want to watch the violation he had perpetrated on my own body so many times.

I could not reach her. Nor could I look away. My eyes, my frantic gaze and empathetic tears were all I had to offer her. But he did not rape her. Instead, he wrapped the belt around her neck, looped the end through the buckle.

It was over in a few minutes, and it was silent except for my screams, which ended abruptly when he released the belt that had become embedded in her delicate neck. Her skin was like clay, the belt cushioned in its purple mass. My voice cut to silence as if it was my own throat being constricted. I slumped, staring as sightlessly as the dead girl before me.

I had killed her. I had done this. My stubbornness, my sheer and unyielding furor to be free of him had led her to this place. A lonely wooden shack in woods unknown, bound, stinking of putrid fear like a compost of freshly slaughtered animal carcasses. A man on her back, tightening the strap.

When he approached me, he seemed to come from miles away, a dot on the horizon, even as I felt his leg brush against me. His voice seemed low and muffled as if he were talking to me from across the room.

“Now,” he said breathlessly. “Tell Daddy how sorry you are, and we can forget this whole thing.”

And God help me, I did.

Connor prowled around his bedroom like a large cat, its hackles raised. He glanced at the phone on every turn as if looking at it would make it ring again, but after an hour it didn’t.

Claire had slipped from his grasp again, leaving him more agitated than ever.

He had tried to use his callback feature to get the number she’d called from, but the damn thing said the number was unavailable, which probably meant she called from a payphone.

Without a subpoena for calls to and from his home telephone, Connor could not access the number. He couldn’t get a subpoena because he wasn’t working on the case with the approval or backing of his division. He’d promised Farrell that he’d use all of his police resources to find Claire, but he never brought the case before Captain Riehl. Connor was on the desk at least until he met with the review board, and even then he might not keep his job. He wasn’t supposed to be doing any active investigative work.