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Caught and Snared
WHEN EMILY WOKE THE next day, the shadow of her argument with Evan seemed a distant memory. She had a dream, a good one, where she and Luke were talking, sitting in a summer meadow, the sky overhead clear, and a light breeze singing through the trees. Emily woke feeling warm and happy. The dream seemed so real she thought for a second it had happened. Then Reger swatted at her from the side of the bed, with a plaintive meow, and she landed with a thud back into her life.
“Yes, I’ll feed you,” she mumbled to the cat. He meowed impatiently, and she left her bed, leaving her dream behind. Reger led her to the kitchen, his tail held high, and stared at her until she opened the cat food can and gave him half the contents. He set on it immediately, as if she never fed him. Then after devouring that he looked up and meowed again.
“You’re such a liar,” she scolded him. “I just fed you and you act like I haven’t.” She covered the can with a plastic lid designed for cat food cans and placed it in the refrigerator.
Reger meowed again.
“No,” she said. “I have to get ready for work.” She noticed she hadn’t flipped her wall calendar from March to April, so she did that now.
She swallowed hard when she saw the date.
April six.
The last time she was with Luke.
She closed her eyes. No wonder things were going wrong. They always did this time of year. For a few moments, she was tossed back into time, where she was tumbling in the air. Luke clutched her furiously, as she and Luke were thrown off his bike. His bike screeched sickeningly into the guardrail, but she and Luke were falling into the ditch. Somehow, Luke twisted in the air so she was on top, and he took the brunt of the fall, the sliding on gravel that paved the slope into a small pool. At the bottom of the grade they stopped, and Emily rose shakily on her legs. But Luke only lay there, blood welling between the gashes of the cuts and scrapes on his face, hands and legs. His leather jacket protected his upper body, but his jeans were torn and his left leg lay angled to the side.
Sniffing, tears falling, Emily took her phone from her backpack, and with shaky hands made the hardest call she ever had to make.
“Daddy,” she said. “We were in an accident. Please come. Luke’s hurt.”
Reger meowed again, jolting her to the present. He stood by his litter box and gave her a plaintive look.
“You are the most spoiled cat in the universe,” she teased. But she cleaned the box while the cat watched. Then, as soon as she was done, he jumped in and scratched around.
“I don’t even want to look,” she said. It never made any sense to her why the cat insisted on dirtying the box immediately after it was cleaned.
She glanced at the calendar again and shook her head. It still shook her; the police, the questions, her parents yelling at her.
“What happened, miss,” said the policeman.
“Obviously, he was drinking,” her father said.
“No! No! Luke wasn’t drinking! A truck came by. It was going too fast, and didn’t get out of the lane we were in. Luke steered onto the shoulder, but when the truck went past, it knocked us around, and the bike slid.”
The policeman believed her, but her parents didn’t.
“What were you thinking getting on that bike?” said her mother. “It’s not safe!”
“You’re supposed to be grounded!” said her father. “You’ll never see him again, Emily Rose Dougherty.”
“Daddy!”
“Not while you live in this house! Go to your room!”
She did, but as she left the room she heard her mother’s words. “Sam, you’re being too hard on her.”
“She could have gotten killed, Amanda. Killed. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”
#
A SHOWER AND COFFEE put her head right. She had no time to think about old loves. She had plenty of problems with her current boyfriend, or rather ex-boyfriend. Her phone had a least forty text messages and ten voice mails. She scanned the texts, each one increasingly nasty. The last one said, “You’ll be sorry.”
She shivered. What had she ever seen in that creep? The problem was Evan Roberts was everything her parents thought she should date. Good education, good job, good Catholic family. She’d never be able to explain to them why she dumped Evan.
Emily tossed her phone in her bag and headed out the door. She was late, or would be, if the traffic on I-91 decided to act up again. It was a busy highway, and rush hour traffic could be truly awful.
Luckily, the early leg of the journey wasn’t bad, and Emily made good time. And then she saw him.
The biker.
It was the same one all right. She had caught the picture of the patch on the back of the jacket the last time, just didn’t see the words then.
Hades’ Spawn.
You couldn’t miss the twin chrome tailpipes of a 2009 XL Sportster, a Harley built for speed. The driver drove like a bat out of hell.
On impulse, Emily sped up. The bike weaved in and out of the slower traffic, but Emily followed down the straight road, passing cars at a rate of speed she never dared before. Her heart pounded with heady excitement as she matched the moves of the unknown driver, determined to catch up with him, to see his face once more. She was going so fast she didn’t notice the state trooper parked on the grassy median. But apparently he noticed her.
Emily’s heart pounded harder as the trooper pulled in back of her, his lights flashing. Gulping, she pulled over onto the shoulder and fumbled in her purse for her driver’s license, and then her glove box for the registration and insurance card. The trooper wearing sunglasses bent over at the passenger side window and tapped on it.
She lowered the window.
“License, registration and insurance card, miss.”
“Yes, officer,” she said, handing him all three documents. He looked at the driver’s license, then her, and without another word walked away.
Emily waited, and waited, until a point where she thought it was becoming entirely ridiculous. She was speeding, she wasn’t going to deny that, but the drivers on this road regularly ignored the speed limits.
However, what got Emily even more frightened is when a second trooper pulled up in front of her car.
The first trooper came to the passenger window again.
“Step out of the car, miss.”
“Look, officer, I’m sorry. I know I was speeding, but I do have to get to work.”
“Step out of the car,” he said even more sternly. The other trooper came to stand next to him.
Emily moved to open her driver’s side door.
“No,” the trooper said. “This side.”
She scooted gracelessly to the passenger side, over the panel where the automatic shift was located between the bucket seats, and the trooper opened the door. Swallowing hard, she got out, not understanding what the fuss was about. “What’s the problem?” she asked, panic rising.
“Put your hands above your head on the car,” he ordered.
“What’s wrong? I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, I’m sorry I was speeding, but is this really necessary?”
The trooper ran his hands up her back and side.
“Do you have any weapons,” he asked.
“What? Of course not.”
“Any needles we should know about?”
“Now see here—”
“Answer the question.”
“No, of course not.” She began shaking. What was going on?
“Have you been drinking?”
“For heaven’s sake, no. I’m on my way to work.”
The officer took her hands and put them behind her back. “You’re under arrest, Ma’am.”
“Arrest, what for?”
“Just get in the cruiser, ma’am. You can straighten this out at the arraignment.”
“Arraignment?” Emily had no idea what was going on. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“That’s for the courts to decide.”
Emily never felt so alone as when the trooper shut her in the back of his cruiser. It was hard sitting with her hands cuffed behind her back. How had her day gone so wrong?
April six. April fucking six.
It took hours, but after they fingerprinted her, took her photograph, and most humiliatingly, did a full body search, she was allowed a phone call. Thankfully, she reached her sister. She couldn’t hold back the tears when she told Angela where she was.
“I’ll be right there. I’ll bring Justin, don’t worry, Em. It’s just a big mistake, some crazy misunderstanding.”
Justin was Angela’s boyfriend, and an attorney. Sure, he was just out of law school, but he passed the Connecticut Bar, and was working for a Hartford law firm.
Finally, a guard led her out of the cell they had put her in to where Angela and Justin waited.
“Emily, are you okay?” Angela hugged her.
“No, no, I’m not. I don’t understand what happened.”
“Why,” Justin asked as he went through a file, “would the police think your car was stolen?”
“What?” Emily punched the table. “Oh, that asshole!”
“Pardon?”
“I broke up with Evan last night.”
“Is Evan the titled owner of the car?” When Emily nodded, Angela scowled. “What a jerk.”
“I don’t understand,” said Justin. “Why is Evan’s name on the car?”
“It’s stupid.” Emily felt her cheeks burn. “I’ve so many student loans I couldn’t get a decent rate on a car loan. He offered to ‘help’ me by getting the loan in his name. So, of course, the title’s in his name too.”
“But you make the payments on the car?” Justin scribbled everything down.
“I have a record of every payment.”
“Good. That’ll help.”
“Help?”
“In court. What started all this?” asked Justin.
“I found him in my apartment last night. He got the landlady to let him in.”
“He doesn’t have a key?”
“No. I never gave him one.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Going through my things. He accused me of cheating on him.”
“What a creep!” muttered Angela.
“Please, can we just get out of here?” Emily was terrified to go back into that cell.
“Yeah, just wait until I tell Mom and Dad.”
“Don’t! Please don’t. Dad never approved of me getting a car loan through Evan. He was ticked and said nothing good would come of it.”
“Emily, I think you have bigger problems than Dad’s I-told-you-so.”
Justin insisted, especially after seeing the “you’ll be sorry” text from Evan, in stopping by the Wakefield police department and filing a stalking complaint against Evan. Emily didn’t want to do it, but Justin was firm.
“The sooner you document everything, the better it is,” he said. “The police can’t do much now, but Evan has got to understand that he has to drop the charges against you if he wants to stay out of trouble himself.”
“But it looks like he said, she said.” Emily hated arguing with Justin, but it just seemed like the police and court were going to throw her in for five to ten.
“Let the courts decide that, Emily. What he did was shitty. Not illegal. Just shitty. But the threats? Those will get him in trouble.”
Emily was mortified to tell the entire story to Grayson Franks, the desk sergeant who took her complaint.
Grayson was a deacon at their church, and his eyebrows raised as he heard her account. “Don’t you worry, Emily. We all know your family and know you wouldn’t do something wrong like this. I’ll send some extra patrols down your street to drive by your apartment. If we see him around there, we’ll have a talk with him.”
“Thanks,” said Emily tonelessly. She was wrung out and tired. What time was it anyways?
“Come on, honey,” Angela said. “Let’s get some things and you’ll sleep at my place tonight.”
“But—”
“No buts. I’m not leaving you alone in your apartment with that maniac running around.”
