“This room will be your home for a while,” Bradshaw told Zoe after she emerged from the bathroom. “I suggest you take care of it. You also might want to clean yourself up a bit. Speaking frankly, you’re more than a little stinky at the moment. I have a few things to do. I’ll be back after dark.”
A few things to do? Zoe resisted a strong urge to tell Bradshaw that first thing he ought to do was to go fuck himself. Instead she silently watched him leave, using the numbers and then his thumb to unlock what she guessed was a steel core door under the fancy wood paneling. When he was gone, she walked over to see if by some miracle her thumbprint could open the lock.
She knew it wouldn’t work. Still, she had to give it a try. She tapped in the numbers 0391 and then placed first one and then her other thumb on the pad. Then each of the rest of her fingers. As expected, the lock remained in place.
Next, she checked the two barred windows. She pulled the curtains aside and looked out over the backyard and the woods beyond. Bradshaw probably chose this room for his prisoner du jour because the windows faced the rear. Unless someone wandered around back and just happened to look up, there would be no way he could see her wave or hear her banging at the window to call for help. Mailmen, deliverymen, lost hikers. None of them were likely to go to the back and look up. Not even a wandering prince to call out Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair. Of course, if the prince did show up, there was no way Zoe’s hair was long enough to do the job, and no way for her prince to get her out through the bars. Sadly, she was stuck.
She studied the view for a minute. Looked down at a stone terrace at the back of the house. No chairs or tables or other outdoor furniture populated the terrace. Because the summer was over? Maybe. More likely because Tyler and his guests didn’t spend much time outdoors. Beyond the terrace lay about a hundred feet of lawn. A little overgrown but not too much. Somebody must have mown it not too long ago . . . maybe at the end of September. A gardener? Could there be a gardener who might come to her rescue? No way. Hoping for that was bullshit. More likely the mower was Bradshaw himself. Or maybe his little brother, if there really was a little brother. If Tyler was in the habit of abducting women and locking them in this ridiculously comfortable prison, he certainly wouldn’t want gardeners or landscapers or any other kind of help coming around and possibly catching sight of his guests. And the gardens she’d seen at the front of the house would have been more carefully tended.
Beyond the scruffy lawn was more woodland. Acres and acres of it. All in the brilliant colors of autumn. Some of the trees had lost enough leaves for Zoe to see what looked like a glimmer of water in the distance. The ocean? No, it didn’t look like the ocean. Too still. Too placid. More likely a lake. Or possibly even a river. The Hudson? No way to tell. Sadly, the water, whatever it turned out to be, was too far away for anyone on a boat either to see Zoe waving or to hear her calling to them. The fact that there was water nearby didn’t help. Unless, she suddenly thought, she could find a mirror or piece of mirror to act as a sun reflector signaling device.
Zoe tried opening one of the windows. No surprise. It wouldn’t budge. She tried the second window with the same result. Closer examination of the frames revealed that Bradshaw had nailed them shut. She supposed if she ever saw anyone back there she could break the glass and shout for help. But deep down she knew she could stand there all day and all night and never see a soul. And if by some miracle she did see someone and managed to signal him, Bradshaw would probably just kill the would-be rescuer before finishing her off. As she stood there looking out, Zoe, who hardly ever cried, felt tears rolling down her cheeks. She was, she decided, totally and completely fucked. In every sense of the word.
She went into the bathroom. Spacious, modern and well outfitted. Deep tub with Jacuzzi spouts and a separate oversized glass-enclosed shower with a little triangular seat in one corner. She opened a closet door. Filled with stacks of thick white towels. Bottles of shampoo, conditioner and bath gel. Rolls of toilet paper and, hanging on a hook on the door, a white terry-cloth robe like one you might find in a Four Seasons hotel but minus the Four Seasons or any other kind of logo.
She longed to take a shower to clean herself and to put on some fresh clothes, most especially underpants that hadn’t been peed in. But did she dare? Would her co-star come sneaking in like Tony Perkins in Psycho and cut her to pieces in the shower? She felt an involuntary shiver as she remembered Hitchcock’s famous shot of the dying Janet Leigh’s blood circling the drain. On the other hand, she was sure he intended to rape her at least once before he killed her. Dead or alive, it was just a question of when. For a moment, she wondered if not showering and remaining “a little stinky” down there might deter him. Probably not. And even if it did, wouldn’t he just kill her sooner rather than later? She wondered if the dream of her funeral represented a portent of things to come. Could you really see the future in your dreams? No! No! No! No! Zoe told herself. That was ridiculous, and she swore once again that she would not give in. She’d fight the bastard any and every way she could. If it meant having sex to keep him from killing her, she decided she’d rather do it on her own terms.
Zoe was no saint and it had been a long time since she’d been a virgin. Not since she was fifteen and she and her best male friend from Dalton, Josh Haskins, both decided they wanted to find out what all the fuss was about. It turned out, with Josh at least, to be much ado about nothing. Of course, there’d been a fair number of other encounters since. Most were more enjoyable than her outing with Josh. A couple of serious boyfriends and a couple not so serious. The only one she’d thought might be the real deal was Alex, at least until she’d caught him fucking Call Me Bella in Zoe’s own bed. But that was all history. Her problem now was Bradshaw.
And maybe, just maybe, she told herself again, if she could make herself fascinating enough, make the sex good enough, make her bon mots amusing enough, manage to keep him from erupting in anger, maybe, just maybe, she could keep Bradshaw from killing her. Or maybe if she was smart about it she could find a way to kill him first. However, if it turned out to be her who was killed first, she thought she’d rather die clean rather than “a little stinky.” She smiled sadly at the thought, wiped the last of her tears away, and told herself to toughen up. Dead or alive, sooner or later the cops would find her. She just hoped it was alive and not too fucked up.
Zoe went back to the bedroom. She opened her black flowered duffel bag and took out all the stuff Bradshaw had crammed in there, including the black dress she’d bought recently to attend the wedding of one of her Dalton classmates. Her stepmother had commented that black was not really an appropriate color for a wedding, but Zoe had worn it anyway. She looked good in black.
She went back to the bathroom and despite throwing an occasional nervous glance at the unlockable door, she tossed her dirty things into an empty hamper. She briefly wondered if it was Bradshaw who did the laundry. Or maybe he gave that chore to the little brother he’d mentioned. Or maybe he just threw the dirty things into the garbage and killed his victims when they ran out of clean clothes. She draped the white bathrobe over the glass wall of the shower where she could get at it quickly and threw a towel next to it. She selected expensive-looking bottles of shower gel, shampoo and conditioner from the closet and climbed into the glass enclosure. She turned on the water, turned it up as hot as she could take it, washed her body and then her hair, and then just stood there letting the water beat against her, hoping the heat would ease some of the tension in her muscles.
That’s when the bathroom door opened and Tyler Bradshaw walked in.