Wild Orchids (2 page)

"Could you please put that gun away? It makes me very nervous. I—I promise I'll do whatever you say." The quaver in her words made them very convincing, Lora felt. She threw a pleading glance at her captor, hoping that for once her face, which had been described as wholesome and honest looking so often that the terms nauseated her, would aid her cause. He didn't even look at her, didn't even grunt. And the gun didn't shift by so much as a millimeter.             

They were passing through the slums of the city now, well away from the places where tourists usually went. The streets were narrow and filled with trash, the buildings on either side of them tumbledown and squalid. Perhaps seven half-naked children darted, screaming and laughing, from behind what appeared to be a ramshackle residential hotel to run across the street in front of the car and disappear behind a one-story cinderblock building on the opposite side of the road. Besides the children, whose laughter could still be heard although they were now out of sight, the only other denizen of the area appeared to be a large, half-starved dog. Should she try it now?

She would do it. She would throw the car into park and… In preparation for what she feared would be the last act of her life, Lora looked down at the gear box to locate park. There was no park. There was first gear, second gear, third gear, reverse, and neutral… There had to be a park— but if there was she couldn't find it.

"Keep your eyes on the road!"

Lora jerked her eyes back up to the road, terrified that he might guess her intention—and discovered that it was too late to carry out her plan in any case. They were just driving through the outskirts of town, past a sign that announced that it was one hundred fifty kilometers to Chichen Itza. Stunted palm trees laced together with dense vegetation crowded forward at the edge of the cleared area surrounding the town, while the blacktop highway itself stretched before them, gleaming and deserted under the blazing afternoon sun. Lora stared blankly at the sun-baked road as the tires seemed to swish out a rhythm of. Too late, too late.

They drove without speaking for maybe twenty minutes, Lora's mind whirling with fear and various plans to save herself—none of which seemed particularly workable—while her captor radiated silent menace. With every sneaking glance she cast him, her terror grew proportionately larger. Quite apart from his size, which was intimidating in itself, there was an aura of violence about him that terrified her. What little she could see of his face looked brutal, and his hand held the gun with an easy familiarity that told its own story. He had no aversion to hurting women… She felt her palms grow damp, and clutched the steering wheel harder to prevent her hands from sliding. The man was clearly a criminal—a violent criminal—and maybe deranged as well. Perhaps he had robbed a bank or something. Why had he abducted her? That was the key. He'd said he needed her for cover. Of course, whoever was after him would be searching for a man alone. They would not be on the lookout for a couple. So maybe that made her chances of survival a little better. At least for a while… Lora took another look at the cruel set of his mouth and shivered. He looked more than capable of rape—and murder.

Lora frantically put her mind to work again. She was only twenty-seven, her whole life was still ahead of her. She hadn't even begun to live—crazily, the words from that song by the Carpenters ran through her mind: "We've only just begun…" She banished the melody, but the words were essentially true. For so many years she had lived her life for others, had done what was best for her family instead of what she had wanted to do. Her older sister, Janice, had married right out of high school as girls frequently did in their small hometown, and Lora might well have followed in her footsteps if fate had not chosen to intervene.

She had been seventeen, a senior in high school when her dearly loved father had been killed in the crash of the car he was driving. Her mother was severely injured in the same crash, and never fully recovered. Emily Harding spent the rest of her life as an invalid, first in a wheelchair and then in bed, growing increasingly bitter as her health deteriorated. As the only daughter left at home, Lora had become nurse,companion, and chief scapegoat rolled into one. Not that anyone had ever asked her to give up her plans for a life of her own to stay home and care for her mother. Everyone, including Janice and even herself, had simply assumed that she would do so. And she had; for ten long years, until this past March when Emily died at last from pnuemonia, which Dr. Ramsey had told her frequently claimed the bedridden.

Lora had grieved when Emily died—she had loved her mother dearly despite the querulousness and vitriolic tongue which had gradually overwhelmed the warm smiles and kind words that had guided Lora's younger days—but secretly, shamefully, she had been glad as well. It meant blessed freedom at last. Freedom for her mother, of course, but Lora was honest enough to admit that the tremendous sense of release she felt was just as much on her own behalf. For the first time in ten years, she was free to live life as she wanted, to do as she pleased without having to consider anyone but herself. It was such a relief to go to bed knowing that she would be able to sleep through the night without her mother calling her two or three times to get her a glass of water, or help her to the bathroom, or perform any of the innumerable mundane tasks that Emily was no longer able to do for herself. It was such a relief to get up in the morning and know that she had only herself to do for; she no longer had to bathe and dress and feed her mother as well; she no longer had to wait for the neighbor who stayed with her mother during the day, or miss work if that neighbor was sick or otherwise unable to come. At last she was free to stay late at the school if some student should need to talk with her without feeling a horrible sense of guilt because her mother was home waiting for her. At last she was able to go away for the weekend, to take a vacation… Since the accident, she had never been able to leave her mother as long as overnight. Emily did not like to be cared for by other than "family," and Janice was "too busy" with her own husband and two daughters to take care of their mother long enough to give Lora even a brief respite. After one abortive weekend which Lora had attempted to spend at a teacher's meeting in Topeka—her mother had fallen out of bed, broken her hip, and been rushed to the hospital, all because, Emily quavered, of Lora's selfishness— Lora had never again been gone for more than a few hours at a time. But now she was free—free.

Three days after her mother's funeral, feeling guilty but wonderfully lighthearted for all that, she walked into Augusta's largest travel agency and gathered up all the brochures on all the exotic places she could find. Emily had left her small estate to be divided equally between her daughters, so Lora had some money. She had used part of the life insurance proceeds plus a dauntingly large bank loan to buy the half-interest in the house from her sister, but there was still nearly ten thousand dollars left. Most of it she would sensibly bank, but some of it—fifteen hundred of it as it turned out—she would spend on a fabulous vacation. Somewhere exotic, with a beach and sun and ocean, and sights to see and…

That somewhere had turned out to be Cancun, Mexico. Even from the beginning, when she had stepped off the airplane to be enveloped by the smell of rotting vegetation and a swarming cloud of ravenous mosquitoes, she had suspected that her dream vacation might not turn out to be quite what she had expected. Between broken air conditioners that might, or might not, be repaired
manana
(how she had grown to dread that ubiquitous tomorrow, which could just as easily mean next week, or next month, or next year!), inedible food, the mosquitoes that feasted on her fair skin every time she set foot outdoors after dark and the sun that broiled her alive during the day, a tour bus that had been broken for four days while its driver waited unconcernedly for a part that would surely arrive
manana,
she had had to work hard to keep her wonderful vacation from turning into nothing but an expensive exercise in aggravation. Still, Lora had determinedly overlooked the myriad irritations, meaning to enjoy herself no matter what. She had even decided that she would no longer be a hostage to a broken tour bus. She wanted to see the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza—the small ruin off the beach near her hotel had merely whetted her appetite for more—and see the ruins she would, whether the rest of the tour group did or not. So she had rented a car and headed out—and here she was, abducted at gunpoint by a criminal. Some dream vacation.

"What's your name?"

Lora started at the question, which was growled near her ear. She flicked a quick look sideways to find that the obsidian eyes were once again visible beneath the brim of the hat. They were regarding her without any sign of emotion at all She thought. Those are the eyes of a cold-blooded killer, and had to take a deep breath to calm her pounding heart before she replied.

"You got papers with you—driver's license and so on?"

Lora nodded.

"If we get stopped by the police, you show them what they ask for and stay inside the car. Don't try anything fancy or you're dead. You got that?"

Lora nodded again, swallowing as she gave him another quick, scared look.

"You here on your own?"

Lora's eyes widened at that. He must be beginning to wonder how long it would be before she would be missed. If she admitted that she was traveling alone, that no one would miss her until the tour group got together to board the chartered plane for home the day after tomorrow, her chances for surviving this would be even less than they were already, she calculated.

"No. I'm with my family. My husband and two children." Her voice was perfectly even. She had never been a good liar, but looking death in the face fortunately seemed to bring out all her latent deceitful instincts.

"You are, huh?" Listening to him speak, Lora grew more and more certain that he was an American. Not only the accent, which she thought sounded vaguely Texan with its slow drawl, but the slang he used, the way he put his words together, was typical of the careless English of the United States. The knowledge that he was a fellow citizen (if he had not been stripped of his citizenship for some nefarious deed) should have made her feel better. After another quick glance at that hard, mustachioed face, it did not.

"Where's your wedding ring?" he shot at her. Lora was taken by surprise by the question, and could not resist shooting a quick glance down at the bare ring finger of her left hand. Good point, she thought, and also registered that he did not entirely believe her story. Why not? Was there something about her that made it seem implausible that she could be married and the mother of two? Surely she did not look old-maidish at twenty-seven! She was reasonably slim and attractive, and her not-quite-blond hair and guileless blue eyes had always led people to assume she was younger than her years. But she certainly looked old enough to be a wife and mother. And probably would have been by now, if not for that car crash…

"I left it at home. I was told that I would be safer in Mexico without expensive jewelry. Because of the criminal element." She could not quite prevent a sardonic inflection from creeping into those last words. He ignored it as his eyes rested briefly on the finger in question.

"Your skin is very smooth. Not a mark on it—as there would be if you wore a ring habitually."

"My ring is very loose.'' That was the best she could come up with. Lora had to give him points for intelligence. He might be a thug, but he was not a stupid thug. Possibly a sociopath. She had read that they were usually highly intelligent… She refused to remember the other things she had read about sociopaths. Panic could not help her.

He grunted, then suddenly bent forward to fish for something beneath his feet. Her purse, she saw as he straightened to open it without so much as a by-your-leave. She thought about protesting, but instinct warned her against it. Compared to kidnapping, and possibly murder and God knew what other acts of mayhem, opening her purse without her permission was a mere bagatelle.

"What are your kids' names?" He had extracted her billfold from the purse and was opening the clasp as he spoke. Suddenly she realized that he was looking for some way of ascertaining whether or not she was telling the truth. Lora smiled with inward triumph. She had pictures of her two little nieces in that billfold.

"Heather and Becky." He had found the pictures of the two blonde girls and was staring at them. The pictures were over a year old, taken when Heather was six and Becky was four. The girls looked adorable—who could murder the mother of such sweet looking children?—and enough like herself to be convincing.        

"And this is your husband?" He was looking at the picture of the man she had been engaged to for the last four years. A math teacher at Augusta High, Brian was thirty-five, good looking in a scholarly way, but perhaps a little set in his ways. But he was kind and thoughtful, and would make a good husband and father some day. And she cared for him a lot.

They could have a good life together. If their relationship sometimes seemed to lack a certain something well, that was life. Certainly having tastes and attitudes in common were more important. And in most of the areas in which they disagreed, Brian turned out to be right; certainly it did make more sense to save all they could of their combined salaries in tax-sheltered investments for retirement rather than squandering a thousand or so on a diamond engagement ring. She didn't
need
a ring…

"What's his name?"

"Brian."

"Brian Harding?"

"Yes." He was looking at her credit cards and driver's license now. Lora thought quickly, but she couldn't remember anything on any of them that might betray her.

''So why weren't he and the kiddies with you in the car?" She breathed a little easier. Apparently there was nothing.

"I wanted to see the ruins at Chichen Itza. Brian didn't, and we both felt that, since the girls get carsick, it would be best if they stayed with him since I would only be gone for a few hours." Lora was pardonably proud of the calm certainty of her tone. If she hadn't known better, she would have believed what she was saying. Why then was her captor fixing her with those narrow, suspicious eyes?