I woke up to the phone ringing.
“Fuuuck,” I said to the walls, and sat up.
I’d been dreaming of my parents as I’d never known them—an intense, vivid dream full of color and light. My father was happy. My mother was wearing a bright yellow sundress, and the whole family was on a hill somewhere in the foothills west of Denver, the wildlife a nearly unspoiled paradise of tall heady-smelling pine trees, the swell of dirt we stood upon covered in bluebells, Indian paintbrushes, purple thistle, sage. I was six years old, my hand on my mother’s arm, resting.
The phone rang again, and I blinked, trying to move through the fog, and concentrate. I thought I’d turned the phone off, right after I’d gotten home last night. Jesus, that thing was irritating. Who would be—
Then my heart started pumping, hard. It could be Debby. Or Nessie. Or the goddamn FBI for that matter.
I went to grab the phone, but in my haste, I whacked it right off my nightstand, and behind the bed, though I could hear it ringing insistently.
“Fuuuuck!”
I turned around and started clawing for it. I was sure it was Debby now. I could just feel it. Finally, my hand found the phone, and after several swipes, I was able to grab it, pull it up, and turn back around.
It was Debby.
“—Bad reception but I needed to call—”
“Debby, I can barely hear you. Are you okay?”
“—we’re—the cabin—but—I—needed to tell you, Jack—”
“Debby, you’re scaring me. I can’t hear you. What’s that? Something about Jack?”
“Trying—Kari, I—Jack, he—”
My heart started really hammering now.
While I was straining to hear what she was saying, all the horror movies I’d seen were moving through my brain. Movies where some psychopath gets a woman alone in the woods, threatens her, tortures her, and finally she finds a way to escape, running through the rain without her shoes, desperate, crying, calling out for her mother, God. Eventually, after hours of wandering—starving, thirsty, she gets to a road, every sound making her scream—thinking that she’s lost and will die alone in the woods after all that effort she’d made to escape. The irony. Then she sees a car, and thinks she’s saved. The car stops as she limps into the road. The door swings open, and she runs toward the car. Then she stops—and starts screaming. It’s the fucking dude who’d imprisoned her, and he drags her into the car while she kicks and screams, right back into the prison she just escaped.
“Jack—threatening—and—scared—”
Then the phone went dead, and I got up, and went over to my couch and sat back down, hard.
I tried calling her back, but all I got was her voicemail, which frightened me even more. How was it that she’d been able to call me, moments ago, and now, suddenly, I couldn’t get her back?
It was exactly what I feared.
I went to get a glass of water. I was sweating like hell. I opened the cabinet, turned the tap on, and ran the water, drinking gratefully when I was done. This was not good, and I had to think very clearly—if I didn’t, Debby might pay with her life.
I started then to make myself coffee, my hands trembling as I fumbled for the filter, poured the water into the reservoir, shook the Folgers into the basket.
I had to wake up, and fast.
He was up there, with his guns, with the kids, and she’d gotten away and was trying to call me, maybe she’d walked down the mountain with her phone—I didn’t know how she still had it, but that wasn’t important—and she was in trouble. Jack was threatening her, and she was scared.
I wished I’d let Debby persuade me to get a firearm after all. That was the only thing that shithead, macho guys like Jack paid attention to.
I needed to call Aunt Sandy—I didn’t know the address, but I knew she did.
I had to get up there.