Like Gravity (32 page)

I
glanced back at the note; it was signed in the bottom right corner with only two initials:

E.S.

And then I knew.

There it was, in black and white.
Undeniable.

He’
d come back for me.

I turned to face the door, to find my phone, to do something,
anything
, to stop what was about to happen. But I knew, even as I spun and caught sight of him in the doorway – his face, the face of my nightmares, unchanged by time or years behind bars – that it was far too late for that.

The table was set, first course had been served.

Somehow, I didn’t think I’d make it to dessert.

Revelations

I’d struggled.

He must’
ve hit me with something that knocked me out for a time, because when I woke up I was no longer in my bedroom. My arms ached, pins and needles shooting through my fingers due to a lack of circulation.

I thought that was odd, until I realized
why
the blood wasn’t flowing to those limbs: my hands had been bound together with a thick, coarse rope, and strung up above my head. The rest of my body dangled in the air, with my tiptoes barely grazing the ground and taking a meager fraction of my weight off my wrists.

There was duct tape across my mouth, blo
cking my airway and my screams for help. Wherever I was, it was completely quiet. I didn’t move for several minutes, hoping that I was alone, and taking stock of my bodily inventory.

I was still wearing my jeans and my dark green sweater from earlier, but my shoes had been removed; my bare toes scraped against the rough, cool cement floor. 
I could no longer feel the weight of my cell phone in my back pocket. My hair fell like a curtain in front of my face, blocking my view of the room around me. Unable to use my hands to push it out of my eyes, I tilted my head up toward the ceiling and tossed it in either direction until the hair draped back over my shoulders.

“Good,
you’re awake.” He’d been here all along, standing on the far side of the room watching me slowly reenter consciousness. His voice may have held the dispassionate courtesy one might use when discussing opposing political views over tea, but his underlying hostility was visible beneath the mask of composure he wore.

Ernest “Ernie” Skinner, in the flesh.

His face had more lines now and his muddy brown hair had some grey strands mixed through it, but the eyes were the same. Dark, fathomless pits of brown-black, they stared back at me, tauntingly victorious. The one difference was that now they weren’t glazed with the aftereffects of too much cocaine – they were completely lucid and full of cool triumph. 

I stared at him warily, unresponsive. My mind was
reeling as I tried to piece together where I was, and how I was going to get out of here. The alternative, that I wasn’t going to escape, was too terrifying to even consider.

The walls were dull gunmetal gray, and looked to be made of concrete or some other thick material. There was no furniture, with the exception of a
set of metal folding chairs and a matching rusted table. Chains hung from steel rafter beams in the ceiling; I had no doubt that my hands were tied to the one running directly above my head. One bare light bulb swung from a wire, illuminating the dark room in a dim yellowish hue.

If I had to guess, I
’d say I was in a basement somewhere.

“It’s good to finally see you, Brooklyn. Face to face, that is,” he laughed, a harsh unnatural sound coming from his lips. “Now that you’ve seen my little gallery, we both know I’ve been
seeing you
for quite a long time.”

He’d been standing about ten feet away from me, bu
t now he began to circle closer with his arms clasped behind his back. I tugged at my wrists, trying to maneuver away from him, but the ropes binding my arms had been tied so tightly I couldn’t swing more than a few inches.

“You know, Brooklyn, you don’t look ver
y comfortable.” He smiled. “I would cut you down, but something tells me you’d be less receptive to our little chat if I did.”

He stopped directly in front of me, an unruffled smile pasted on his
lips as he reached up a hand to tenderly stroke the side my face. I tried to jerk my head away from his touch, but his hand clamped around my jaw with a bruising grip, stilling me. His sudden show of violence was at complete odds with his calm demeanor.

Now that he was closer to me, I could see he had a
gaping cut on his forehead, just above his right eye. It was scabbed over, as if it had been healing for about a month, and I knew immediately that it had been put there by my stiletto heel that night in the alleyway.

With one hand still wrapped around my jawbone, he brought his other up to savagely rip the duct tape from my mouth. I yelped as the adhesive tore at my lips, splitting the bottom one open and sending a trickle of blood leaking down my chin. As I gasped for air, I watched his pupils dilate in excitement – he definitely enjoyed the sight of me hurt.

His thumb brushed at the wound, smearing the blood all over my chin and lips before
he released me and took a step back. He looked down at the bright streaks of red staining his fingers and smiled softly.

I whimpered in fear.

As soon as he backed off, I began screaming for help, praying that someone above ground would hear me and send for help. His smile remained in place as my cries grew desperate, my frantic voice hoarse with use. He was serene – unhurried and unconcerned, as if he had all the time in the world to toy with me. That in itself told me numerous things: either he was crazy enough not to fear discovery by neighbors and passerby, or we were in a spot so isolated, so far removed from civilization, that no one could hear me for miles.

“Go ahead, Brooklyn,” he said. “Scream all you want. There’s no one around to hear you.”

A chill raced down my spine as my suspicions were confirmed.

I was alone.
Help wasn’t coming.

“Lexi.” My voice
sounded weak; clearing my throat, I tried again. “Lexi will notice if I don’t come home,” I said, trying to reason with him. “If you let me go, I promise I won’t tell anyone about this. It’ll be our secret.”

“Oh, Brooklyn,” he said, shaking his head
in a show of disappointment. “I wish you hadn’t lied to me. There’s a price for lies, you know.”

“I’m not lying,” I whispered.

Abruptly, his arm flew out from behind his back and he backhanded me across the face. The force of the blow rocked my whole body backward, it’s motion only stopped by the rope tether binding my hands. Stars swam in front of my eyes and tears leaked down my face as pain ricocheted from my smarting cheekbone to my ravaged wrists and back again. My wrist bones had nearly snapped under the strain of the hit; the skin felt raw beneath the ropes, chafed, bloodied, and stinging painfully.

“
There’s a price for lies,” he repeated flatly, returning his hands to their clasped position. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes. I was just about to discuss our plans for the afternoon. You didn’t have anything scheduled, did you?” He chuckled.

I didn’t respond.

“I assume you didn’t, given the fact that Lexi is off with her boyfriend for the weekend and you’ve put an end to your own dalliance with
Finn
.” He sneered Finn’s name with contempt, the most emotion I’d yet to see from him; even when he’d struck me across the face, he’d seemed only clinically interested, his impassive nature untouchable.

He spoke with pe
rfect annunciation and diction, his grammar perfect and his tone practiced, as if he’d rehearsed these words countless times.
He probably has,
I realized.
He’s been planning this for years.

“I must say, Brookl
yn, it made me very happy when you broke off that relationship.”

Well, h
e might’ve thought he knew everything about me, but at least he didn’t know Finn and I were back together.

Wait…
Finn!

I’d been so preoccupied, what with being abducted and strung up by a psychopath, that I’d completely forgotten he was coming over at eight. H
ope flared to life in my chest. I had no idea what time it was now, though I suspected it was midafternoon; eight was likely still hours away, but if I could just hold on till then…

Why hadn’t I agreed to let him come over right away?
I lamented internally, hating myself for telling him to wait. By the time he got to my apartment, saw the photos, realized that I’d been taken, and called the police, it may well be too late for me.

Plus, there was the fact that I didn’t even know where I was.

The hope dwindled to embers, then died out.

By this point I’d realized that he hadn’t simply been watching me or spying on me; he’d been listening, learning, picking up every scrap of information
he could find. He’d probably bugged my apartment with listening devices and cameras – it would certainly explain where he’d gotten the photos of me in the shower and my bedroom.

What I didn’t understand was
why
. So I asked him.

“
Why?
” he echoed, as if the question was incomprehensible to him. I could see, beneath that veneer of calm, that I’d thrown him off balance. I didn’t understand; it should have been the simplest question in the world for a normal person to answer.

That’s when I realized: I wasn’t dealing with a normal person.

I was dealing with a sociopath.

This wasn’t a revenge mission, driven by passion or vengeance or nearly two decades of anger. It was a cool, calculated meting out of justice; his way of evening the score.
And he would eliminate me as easily as a king taking a rook off the chessboard – with meticulous concentration and well-planned moves he’d thought out far in advance.

My sense of hopelessness grew as
I realized what that meant.

He likely hadn’t been sloppy when he’d put this plan together,
insuring that nothing was easily tied back to him. Emotions didn’t drive him, and therefore couldn’t be used to manipulate him into making mistakes. And he would have no qualms when it came time to kill me.

“
Can you believe I only served twelve years before they let me out? I see from your face that you can’t.” He laughed. “You’ve gotta love that trusty old California legal system. Good behavior gets you a long way with the guards. And when I went before that parole board with tears in my eyes and told them all about how I’d found the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he’d guided me from the dark path of substance abuse and violence, out into the light? Well, I must say, just about every damned one of them got misty-eyed.”

I star
ed ahead impassively, trying to show no reaction to his words.

“I should’ve gotten a damn Oscar for that performance,” he said, smiling at the memory. “Instead, I got paroled and s
ent back out into the world, a
changed man
. That’s what they want to believe, you know – that prison fixes us, takes out all the bad tendencies and swaps ‘em for goodness and a healthy respect for authority.  It’s what they have to believe, otherwise they wouldn’t sleep at night – but it’s not the truth.”

I swallowed nervously, watching as he approached me once more.

“The truth is, sweet Brooklyn, that all time in the slammer does is offer you plenty of time to think,” he whispered, his breath hot on my face. “Can you guess who I thought about?”

I began to tremble.

“That’s right,” he said softly, tracing one finger down my cheek, across my collarbone, and into the cleavage revealed by the v-neck of my sweater. He stopped midway down my chest, his finger skimming slowly back and forth across the swell of my breasts. “I thought about you.”

***

He disappeared for a while, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

Arms aching, I hung with my back bowed against the
strain and tried to imagine I was anywhere else in the world. Closing my eyes, I mentally erased the concrete walls around me, and pictured a different night – the night I was supposed to have.

Finn would
arrive, stepping through the door and into my arms. He’d hold me, kiss me, and everything would be all right in my world again.

I think about an hour passed. It must have been close to
dinnertime by now – around six or seven most likely – because my stomach had begun to rumble with hunger.

When
Skinner returned, emerging from a stairwell located somewhere behind me, he was holding the green dress in one hand. A large, wickedly sharp kitchen knife was clasped in the other. He approached me and a helpless, involuntary mewling noise burst from the back of my throat. I’d begun to tremble as soon as he’d appeared.

“Now, now, Brooklyn,” he said, making a
tsk
sound. “I’m not going to hurt you before dinner. That wouldn’t be very polite.”

As if social niceties are a factor when you’ve got a girl hanging from your basement ceiling. He really is crazy.

“We’re going to be together for a long time, my dear. All that nasty business can certainly wait until after we’ve eaten.”

My mind raced as I wondere
d what constituted a “long time” in his warped brain. Minutes? Hours? Days?
Years?
I could barely survive the mental strain of three hours with the man – if he made me his plaything, keeping me here for weeks on end…

Well, let’s just say, I think I’d sooner choose the quick end with the sharp knife.